TaoSecurity Blog

  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...

In this post I would like to share a few thoughts on self-publishing a book , in case anyone is considering that option. As I mentioned in my post on  burnout , one of my goals was to publish a book on a subject other than cyber security. A friend from my Krav Maga school, Anna Wonsley , learned that I had  published several books , and asked if we might collaborate on a book about stretching. The timing was right, so I agreed. I published my first book with Pearson and Addison-Wesley in 2004, and my last with No Starch in 2013. 14 years is an eternity in the publishing world, and even in the last 5 years the economics and structure of book publishing have changed quite a bit. To better understand the changes, I had dinner with one of the finest technical authors around, Michael W. Lucas . We met prior to my interest in this book, because I had wondered about publishing books on my own. MWL started in traditional publishing like me, but has since become a full-time ...

Today, 8 January 2010, is the 7th birthday of TaoSecurity Blog . I wrote my first post on 8 January 2003 while working as an incident response consultant for Foundstone. 2542 posts (averaging 363 per year) later, I am still blogging. I don't have any changes planned here. I plan to continue blogging, especially with respect to network security monitoring, incident detection and response, network forensics, and FreeBSD when appropriate. I especially enjoy reading your comments and engaging in informed dialogues. Thanks for joining me these 7 years -- I hope to have a ten year post in 2013! Don't forget -- today is Elvis Presley 's birthday. Coincidence? You decide. The image shows Elvis training with Ed Parker , founder of American Kenpo . As I like to tell my students, Elvis' stance is so wide it would take him a week to react to an attack. Then again, he's Elvis . I studied Kenpo in San Antonio, TX and would like to return to practicing, along with ice...

Welcome to my blog! The main new content will be news of book reviews that I've had published at Amazon.com . In 2002 I read and reviewed 24 books on computer security topics. Most recently, these included The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security by Kevin Mitnick and The Hacker Diaries: Confessions of Teenage Hackers by Dan Verton. My first published review of 2003 is a four star review of BGP (O'Reilly, Sep 2002) by Iljitsch Van Beijnum. You can see my book reading (and reviewing) schedule by visiting www.bejtlich.net/reading.html . I will no longer try to review every security book which hits the shelves! That was a pipe dream, even when I started reading these sorts of books in 1998. The books I add to my schedule either address a topic about which I need to know more, or offer original content by an interesting author. Thank you for visiting! Richard Bejtlich TaoSecurity