Introduction
On my trip through the United States I bought the mentioned book as a relaxed reading during the flight back home. This book review shall give you a short insight into the contents and what you can get out of it.
Contents
The book mainly collects stories told by former hackers. Most of them wanted to be anonymous because their doings would be a crime even these days.
The book starts with a story called “Hacking the Casinos for a Million Bucks”. This story is about some guys reverse engineering a slot machine in the old casino days – very entertaining. They explain how they’ve reverse engineered the firmware of one of the slot machines. The story reminds you of several movies shown in cinemas during the past few years. Very interesting.
Another really good story you’ll find in chapter eight: “Your Intellectual Property Isn’t Safe”. The story is about a hacker trying to steal intellectual property from a company. In the end, it took the guy two years to reach his goal. One lesson I’ve learned from this story is: Hackers will find it – always. Hackers have all the time in the world. If there is a weakness in your IT environment, they’ll find it for sure. It is only a matter of time. So beware and secure your environment. It is by far harder to protect an IT environment against all possible vulnerabilities than attacking an environment and finding just one vulnerability or weakness to get in. The hacker clearly has an advantage. You’ll never be sure.
Chapter ten also covers a very good story about “Social Engineering”, a hacker methodology used very often these days. Social Engineering is always about the weakest part of IT Security – the human being. You can learn a lot about Social Engineering for sure.
Recommendation
This book helps you understand the way hackers think. If you want to protect an IT environment against hackers, you’ll have to understand how they work and how they behave. Hackers are creative people. Kevin, as a former hacker, did a very good job in collecting stories all around his network and created a very enlightening book. The book costs 17 USD and I can really recommend reading it.