Pre-Review: Writing Security Tools and Exploits

Yesterday I posted a pre-review for Penetration Tester's Open Source Toolkit. I wrote that I thought the two chapters on Metasploit looked interesting. Today I received a review copy of the new Syngress book pictured at left, Writing Security Tools and Exploits by James Foster, Vincent Liu, et al. This looks like a great book, with chapters on various sorts of exploits, plus sections on extending Nessus, Ethereal, and Metasploit.

Metasploit, hmm. I looked at chapters 10 and 11 in Writing and found them to be identical to chapters 12 and 13 in Penetration. Identical! I can't remember the last time I saw a publisher print the same chapters in two different books. I assume James Foster wanted the chapters he wrote for Penetration to appear in Writing because he follows with a new chapter 12 on more Metasploit extensions.

This realization made me remember another Syngress book that I received earlier this year -- Nessus, Snort, & Ethereal Power Tools. I saw that Noam Rathaus had written chapters on Nessus for both Power Tools and Penetration. Could they be the same? Sure enough, chapters 3 and 4 in Power Tools match chapters 10 and 11 in Penetration.

So, 4 out of the 13 chapters in Penetration are published in other books. I would enjoy hearing someone at Syngress explain this, or perhaps one of the authors could comment?

Comments

Anonymous said…
Two other Syngress titles suffer from the same problem:
Buffer overflow attacks
sockets, shellcode, porting & coding

Two chapters on shellcode are exactly the same in these two books. The exploit case studies from Buffer overflow attacks are also repeated in the other book.
9:10 AM
Anonymous said…
This scenario looks just like modern day movies, no originality. Everyone just keeps doing remakes (or reprints in this case) of old stuff.
7:58 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technical or pol
Read more