Chapter 2. How to Use This Book

IN THIS CHAPTER

·        How to Use This Book? Duh!

·        Methods of Using This Book

·        The Book's Parts

·        This Book's Limitations

·        Odds and Ends to Know About Maximum Security

·        Cool Stuff on the CD-ROM

·        Programming Languages

How to Use This Book? Duh!

Most computer books have the infamous "How to Use This Book" chapter. If you're like me, you probably never read them. After all, the best way to use a book is to read it, so what more needs to be said? Well, you might be surprised.

This book is structured very differently from your average computer title. In fact, it's structured so differently that there really are different ways to use this book. This chapter, therefore, briefly discusses ways to maximize your usage of Maximum Security.

This Book's General Structure

Maximum Security contains more than 1,000 URLs or Internet addresses. These URLs house important security information, including the following:

·        Freely available tools

·        Commercial security tools

·        White papers or technical reports

·        Security advisories

·        Source code for exploits

·        Security patches

We designed Maximum Security this way to provide you with supplemental information. Thus, you're getting more than just hundreds of pages of my rhetoric. You're getting a roadmap to online sources of Internet security information.

The links take you places that maintain security information which is constantly being updated. Ideally, when you're finished, you will never buy another general Internet security book. Instead, you'll know where to find the very latest security information online. This book has also been designed to teach you underlying information security methodology. Although some of the material in this book will obviously be dated over time, the techniques this book teaches are not time critical.

For these reasons, Maximum Security has many advantages over its competitors. True, you can read Maximum Security cover to cover to gain a solid, basic understanding of Internet security. However, the book's real purpose is to provide you with

1.       Internet security tools

2.       A roadmap for securing your environment

Methods of Using This Book

There are three basic ways to use this book:

·        To learn the basics of information security

·        To secure a computing environment

·        For heavy-duty security research

Each approach is slightly different. Let's quickly cover these now.

Learning the Basics of Information Security

If you bought Maximum Security to learn the basics of information security, you can rejoice. The book is well suited to that purpose. To gain the maximum benefit, read the book cover to cover. If you encounter online references, it might be wise to stop reading the book, and download the referenced document. Not all the external references are pivotal to understanding information security principles, but they aren't superfluous either.

Information security is slowly moving from a black art to a more calculated science. However, the field is, for the most part, very young. Because of this, it is dotted with true experts and amazing phonies, with most people treading the middle ground. If you finish this book and truly grasp most of what has been discussed, you will be ahead of the curve—no doubts about that. And, by the time you're done, the fourth edition of Maximum Security should be released. However, we would recommend against downloading source code unless you are already familiar with the basics of C, makefiles, compilers, and so on. Chances are, if you're entirely new to information security, you probably don't need even one-tenth of the programs mentioned in this book.

Using This Book to Secure a Computing Environment

If you've bought Maximum Security to secure a network, you'll really dig this third edition. You'll note that we've made a lot of additions in this revision that focus on corporate environments and attack strategies. When you spot the various Notes and Tips spread throughout the chapters don't skip them—read them! Learn from our experiences—and our mistakes! Although you will definitely benefit from reading the entire book, there are some parts that will be more relevant then others. Part II, "Security Concepts," is a must-read. Part IV, "The Defender's Toolkit," can be used for reference when you start evaluating and looking for tools to help you. Finally, Part VI, "Platforms and Security," is where you'll want to focus a lot of your time—this is where you'll find a lot of the low-level guts of how to lock systems down.

Note

You might spend some time downloading tools mentioned in this book. To save you some time, on the CD-ROM you'll find that many of the tools mentioned are linked into HTML pages. Load these into your browser and you'll be good to go.

Using This Book for Heavy-Duty Security Research

If you bought Maximum Security to do serious research, you'll want to take a completely different approach in reading it. The majority of the additional links, product, and vendor information is located at the ends of the chapters. This should allow people looking specifically for additional resources easier access to the information, while simultaneously removing the "yellow pages" feel of the older versions of this book.

There is a ton of references to third-party tools, and we've borrowed on some of my experiences from running the Network Computing Magazine Chicago Lab to add additional commercial products. (Earlier editions didn't list as many of the commercial tools.)

Feed these URLs to a personal spider or a utility like WGET, and you can pull down every external source we've referenced. Enjoy.

The Book's Parts

This section describes the book's various parts and the subjects treated in them.

Part I: "Setting the Stage"

Part I sets the stage and assists new readers in understanding the current climate in the information security scene. It also introduces some of the problems we face, and why we face them. Topics include the following:

·        Why this book was written

·        Why you need security

Part II: "Security Concepts"

Part II addresses the basics of information security, provides a roadmap for how to get started in cleaning up an environment, and provides some background on the Internet's early development. Topics include the following:

·        Some of the pillars of information security strategies

·        A brief tour of the underground

·        A primer on TCP/IP

·        Poor security on the Internet and the reasons for it

·        Internet warfare as it relates to individuals and networks

·        Definitions of hacking and cracking

·        A brief look at who is vulnerable, and why

Part III: "Hacking 101: The Tricks of the Trade"

Part III examines the hacking scene in greater detail. It covers the contents of a hacker's toolbox. It familiarizes you with Internet munitions, or weapons. It covers the proliferation of such weapons, who creates them, who uses them, how they work, and how you can benefit from them. It also gives you a first-hand look at exploiting vulnerabilities, as well as drilling into some of the top problems the Net faced in 1999 and 2000. Some of the topics covered are:

·        Use of exploit scripts

·        The evolution of exploits and the "0-day" phenomena

·        Spoofing and masking one's identity

·        Dispelling some of the hacking folklore

Part IV: "The Defender's Toolkit"

Part IV examines the tools, utilities, and products used to defend your environment from hostile attacks. We examine the products and concepts of the following tools:

·        Firewalls

·        Vulnerability assessment tools (scanners)

·        Intrusion detection systems

·        Logging and auditing tools

·        Password crackers

·        Sniffers

Part V: "Virtual Weapons of Mass Destruction"

Part V deals with the nastiest software in the computing industry—things that are used to destroy systems and networks. In this part, we examine

·        Viruses and worms

·        Denial of Service (DoS) tools

·        Trojan horses

Part VI: "Platforms and Security"

Part VI deals with creating strategies to protect specific machines and operating systems from hostile activity. We examine issues involving the following platforms:

·        Microsoft operating systems

·        UNIX

·        Novell NetWare

·        Cisco's IOS

·        Macintosh

·        VAX/VMS

Part VII: "Bringing It All Together"

Part VII deals with taking all the previous sections and tying them together to formulate a comprehensive information security strategy. It also cover some topics in greater detail, including:

·        Forming policies and procedures

·        Network architecture considerations

·        Application development issues

·        Addressing internal security

·        How to mine the crazy amount of information out there

This Book's Limitations

This book is wide in scope but has several limitations. Before enumerating these shortcomings, we want to make an important point: Information security is a complex field. If you're charged with securing a network, relying solely on this book is a terrible mistake. No book has yet been written that can replace the experience, gut feeling, and basic savvy of a good system or network administrator. It is likely that no such book will ever be written. That settled, please allow us to point out this book's limitations in terms of timeliness and utility.

Timeliness

The first limitation of this book relates to timeliness.

The degree to which timeliness will affect the benefits you reap from this book depends on several factors. Many people don't use the latest and the greatest in software or hardware. Economic and administrative realities often preclude this. Thus, there are LANs with Internet connectivity that have workstations running Windows for Workgroups. Similarly, some folks are using SPARCstation 1s, running SunOS 4.1.3. Because older software and hardware exist, much of the material here will remain current. (Good examples are machines with fresh installs of an older operating system that has now been proven to contain numerous security bugs.)

Rest assured, however, that as of this writing, the information contained within this book was current. If you are unsure whether the information you need has changed, contact your vendor. With this said, however, the TECHNIQUES this book will teach you are without an expiration date. Although the holes we detail relating to Microsoft products in this book will eventually be a thing of the past, we're quite confident Microsoft will continue to provide us with new, even more elegant problems to overcome. The same goes for other vendors and software writers. The specifics will change quite a bit; the strategies will change very little. Learn the strategy, and the rest becomes footwork.

Utility

Although this book contains practical examples, it's not a how-to for cracking Internet servers. True, we provide many examples of how cracking is done and even utilities with which to accomplish that task, but this book will not make the reader a master hacker or cracker. There is no substitute for experience, and this book cannot provide that.

What this book can provide is a strong background in Internet security. A reader with little prior knowledge of the subject will come away with enough information to crack or secure their network.

Odds and Ends to Know About Maximum Security

Here are a few notes on this book:

·        Links and home pages. The first edition provided readers direct links to many files, often bypassing the home pages of vendors. In this edition, we've done things a little differently. If a vendor requires that you register prior to downloading their tool, we provide the registration URL. This is only fair.

·        About all those products. There are hundreds of products mentioned in this book, but we're not affiliated with any of them. If a product is mentioned, it's here purely because it's useful.

·        Mistakes and such. If you find that your product has been mentioned and the information was incorrectly reported, please contact this book's Associate Publisher. In addition, we would personally like to know, so please drop us a line at maxsec@neohapsis.com.

Cool Stuff on the CD-ROM

The CD-ROM has some special tools and information, including:

·        A list of all URLs from this book (just click and go)

·        Bastille a utility to tighten security on Linux and Unix machines

·        Nmap a port scanner

·        Snort an open source network intrusion detection system

·        OpenSSH a free implementation of the SSH suite of network connectivity tools

·        OpenSSL an open source toolkit implementing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) protocols

These things should get you started right away.

Unfortunately, this approach of placing things on CD-ROM has its disadvantages. For example, you will need many additional tools to reap the maximum benefit from this book:

·        A Web browser

·        An FTP client

·        Archiving utilities

·        Document readers

·        A compiler (if you want to compile source code)

In the next few sections, prior to discussing various methods of using this book, I'd like to provide locations where you can obtain these tools for free.

FTP Clients

Although you can download most of the files mentioned in this book via a Web browser, it might be wise to have an FTP client on hand. Table 2.1 provides locations for FTP clients for most operating systems.

Archive File Formats

If you're lucky, you have a 1.5Mbps or faster connection to the Internet. Sadly, many users don't. Instead, many folks still surf using a 28.8 or 56k modem connection, and at that speed, the Internet is pathetically slow. When Webmasters provide files for download, they generally compress them, and by doing so reduce the file size. The smaller the file, the quicker it will download. These compressed files are referred to as archives, or archived files.

Archives are created using compression packages. Unfortunately, there is no universally used compression format. Therefore, files compressed on a Macintosh might be difficult to decompress on an IBM-PC compatible. Because many online references in this book are archived files, you must obtain tools that can uncompress all archive formats. Table 2.2 provides locations for various archiving tools.

Text File Formats and Document Readers

When compiling this edition, we tried to favor sites that offer documents in HTML (which is a fairly universal format). However, that wasn't always possible. Thankfully, many site authors are now providing their documents in PDF, a document format invented by Adobe. PDF is architecture-neutral and to read a PDF document, all you need is the free PDF reader for your platform.

Note

PDF stands for Portable Document Format. After years of research, Adobe developed PDF to satisfy the need for a universal typesetting technique. PostScript preceded PDF and was very powerful. However, some PostScript documents require a PostScript printer. PDF remedies this problem.

You might be wondering why all technical reports and white papers aren't written in ASCII. After all, ASCII is a universally recognized standard, and easily readable on any platform. The reason is this: You cannot embed graphs, sketches, or photographs in ASCII text documents. Because many technical reports have diagrams (often of network topology), ASCII is poorly suited for this task.

You might also wonder why all technical reports or white papers aren't written in HTML (especially because anyone on the Internet can read HTML). There are several reasons. First, although HTML specifications have made great progress in recent years, most HTML packages don't adhere strictly to those standards, nor do they force HTML authors to do so. HTML doesn't always look the same from platform to platform, or even from browser to browser. Also—and this is a major factor—writing a document in HTML can require knowledge of HTML tags. Technical report authors might not have time to learn about these tags. True, WYSIWYG HTML editors exist, but even using these takes more time than simply writing out a document in your favorite word processor. (Some advances have been made with export filters. For example, PageMaker and Microsoft Word both let you export documents to HTML. Again, these filters aren't perfect, and there's no guarantee that the document will come out precisely as it was designed.)

You must be prepared to accommodate different file formats. That is easier than it sounds. Most commercial word processor manufacturers are aware of this situation. Therefore, they make readers available to the public. Readers are programs that will read a document written in this or that format. (For example, Adobe makes a PDF reader, and Microsoft makes a Word reader.) Readers are generally free. Table 2.3 provides a list of locations for popular word-processing readers.

Programming Languages

Many links in this book lead you to source code. Source code is raw programming code that when compiled or interpreted constitutes a functional computer program. To capitalize on the source code you encounter, you will need the proper compiler or interpreter. These tools and their locations are listed in Table 2.4.

Summary

That's it. This book was overhauled something fierce, but we believe only for the better.Have fun.