This Is No Jokey

This book cover always elicits a laugh.



The idea that "hacking" is for "dummies" always bothered me. Is that all it takes to 0wn a system? Even a dummy could do it? Yes, that is a real book, with a second edition en route.

Today, I see this.



As we used to say when teaching at Foundstone, "this is no jokey." Are they kidding me? Who is the dummy here -- the person who is writing the rootkits or the person who buys this real book expecting to remove a rootkit? It's definitely not the former. For the latter, maybe the removal section is just this advice:

  1. Reformat hard drive.

  2. Reinstall from trusted media.

  3. Repeat as necessary.


Honestly, the number of people who could even try to recover from a real rootkit installation number in the dozens. Who is supposed to buy this new book? What is really in it? I don't plan to review it -- my reading list is already a mile deep and my wish list is almost as high.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Whenever someone at work leaves their workstation unlocked, we set their background to the "hacking for dummies" image.
2:23 AM
Anonymous said…
I don't know which is real and which is not but if you want you can create a fake "for dummies" cover here : http://www.signgenerator.org/books/dummies/
;)
6:29 PM
Anonymous said…
I actually saw "The Koran for Dummies" sitting in someone's car earlier this week.
1:32 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 technica...
Read more