Silence on the Wire: A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks

click here for more details, find new or used items	Michal Zalewski Our price £27.99 New from £15.66 Used from £12.88 Pages: 312 (Paperback) ISBN: 1593270461 Pub: NO STARCH PRESS Pub date: 2005-04-01 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 238337

Reader Reviews:

very very good (0/0 people found this helpful)

I can't recommend this book enough. So many of the IT-related books out there are half hearted affairs which do nothing more than paraphrase existing documentation, but SOTW is a different animal.

If you're a sysadmin wanting to secure your network, this isn't the book for you. But if you have a hackerish (and I mean that in the true sense of the word) mentality and love learning, you'll adore this book. I really home we see more books from Zalewski

Looks like sci-fi, but this is the reality! (1/1 people found this helpful)

I bought this book in polish and read it from cover to cover. Michal is not pretending to be one of many 'hackers', he doesn't write about hacking even. What this book explains is about different ways your information may leak out and why this may happen. The book is written in a slightly philosophic way and for sure leaves the reader with many topics to think about. Michal is not trying to build any type of oppinion - what he does by describing his research (yes - he is a researcher, historician, network and software engineer at the same time) is asking questions but all of us have to find our own answers.

It's a real 5 STARS book! Worth the time and money - but don't forget to read the first few chapters to get in the right mood, even if those chapters will seem to be too technical... Believe me, they are not :-)

A very interesting read indeed! (0/0 people found this helpful)

The book is very detailed and clear! The author has a way to suck you into reading more into the topic. As the previous reviewer says "The book is full of amazingly clever attacks, but explained in a way that makes all the concepts completely clear." And I have to agree with him. Overall I give this book 5 stars!

A book every bit as good as it's title (5/5 people found this helpful)

Silence on the Wire is, nominally, about network security. However, while it contains technical information this is far from a technical book. The focus of Zalewski's interest is on the unintended and the unexpected, the places where the systems that bind the internet together are a little ragged, and where the layers of abstraction in every piece of software don't quite match reality.

The book is full of amazingly clever attacks, but explained in a way that makes all the concepts completely clear. Early on for example, the author spends several pages explaining how to build up a computer processor (in wood, should one desire) in order to explain a series of ingenious ways of recovering information, such as code keys, by looking at how long processing them takes. Later he explains the basic protocols that make up the internet, in order to show how much information is placed, unintentionally, on the wire.

Michal Zalewski's love for this strange world of background noise and broken messages is self evident, and his wit and humour lend the book a relaxed air. Still, there is hardly any filler and I think it would be very hard to come away without having your mind opened, at least slightly, to the vast sea of information that there for anyone inquisitive enough to listen.

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