Incident Response & Computer Forensics, 2nd Ed. - Softcover

Mandia, Kevin; Prosise, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 007222696X ISBN 13: 9780072226966

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education, 2003

Synopsis

Written by FBI insiders, this updated best-seller offers a look at the legal, procedural, and technical steps of incident response and computer forensics. Including new chapters on forensic analysis and remediation, and real-world case studies, this revealing book shows how to counteract and conquer today’s hack attacks.

About this title

Review

Incident Response aims to teach you how to determine when an attack has occurred or is underway--they're often hard to spot--and show you what to do about it. A strong system of defences will save your systems from falling victim to published and otherwise uninventive attacks, but even the most heavily defended system can be cracked under the right conditions. Authors Kevin Mandia and Chris Prosise favour a tools--and procedures-centric approach to the subject, thereby distinguishing this book from others that catalogue attacks and methods for dealing with each. The approach is more generic and therefore better suited to dealing with newly emerging attack techniques.

Anti-attack procedures are presented with the goal of identifying, apprehending and successfully prosecuting attackers. The advice on carefully preserving volatile information, such as the list of processes active at the time of an attack, is easy to follow. The book is quick to endorse tools, the functionalities of which are described so as to inspire creative applications. Information on bad-guy behaviour is top-quality as well, giving readers knowledge of how to interpret logs and other observed phenomena. Mandia and Prosise don't--and can't--offer a foolproof guide to catching crackers in the act, but they do offer a great "best practices" guide to active surveillance. --David Wall

Topics covered: Monitoring computer systems for evidence of malicious activity and reacting to such activity when it's detected. With coverage of Windows and Unix systems as well as non-platform-specific resources like Web services and routers, the book covers the fundamentals of incident response, processes for gathering evidence of an attack and tools for making forensic work easier.

Review

"... poorly trained network administrators and the lack of firewalls and intrustion detection systems still make it difficult to find the source and strategy of the attack." Computerworld article (8/21/00) on Incident Response featuring David Dittrich, a researcher who spoke at the Usenix Security Symposium."

Edition details

• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 007222696X
• ISBN 13: 9780072226966
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 544