The Art Of Intrusion by Kevin D. Mitnick & William L. Simon

From the Publisher

Hacker extraordinaire Kevin Mitnick delivers the explosive encore to his bestselling The Art of Deception. In his bestselling The Art of Deception, Mitnick presented fictionalized case studies that illustrated how savvy computer crackers use "social engineering" to compromise even the most technically secure computer systems.

Now, in his new book, Mitnick goes one step further, offering hair-raising stories of real-life computer break-ins-and showing how the victims could have prevented them.

Mitnick's reputation within the hacker community gave him unique credibility with the perpetrators of these crimes, who freely shared their stories with him-and whose exploits Mitnick now reveals in detail for the first time, including:

- A group of friends who won nearly a million dollars in Las Vegas by reverse-engineering slot machines
- Two teenagers who were persuaded by terrorists to hack into the Lockheed Martin computer systems
- Two convicts who joined forces to become hackers inside a Texas prison
- A "Robin Hood" hacker who penetrated the computer systems of many prominent companies-and then told them how he gained access

From Thinking of book
The Art Of Intrusion book is the real stories behind the exploits of hackers, intruders and deceivers. Kevin D. Mitnick - a celebrated hacker who’s gone straight and now devotes his considerable skills to helping corporations, organizations, and government agencies protect themselves from the kinds of attacks described in this book, and best selling author William L. Simon, teamed up to explains the black-hat and white-hat hackers stories for reader’s educations and entertainment.

The true stories of four pals clean up in Vegas with a pocket-sized computer; a bored Canadian teen gains access to the wire transfers section of a major Southern bank; a couple of kids are recruited to hack into Lockheed Martin and the America’s Defense Information System Network by a terrorist with ties to Osama bin Laden, and many more are the examples of the hostile world of computer and Internet crime.

If you’re the security officer in your organization, the tales in this book crawled out of that closet where your nightmares live. Fears about national security keeping you awake? Put the coffee on, it gets worse. And if you just enjoy a heck of a good cliffhanger full of spies and real-life intrigue, strap yourself in for a wild read, and enjoy!

I would like to say that by reading this book, the lesson of these stories, whether they happened one year ago or seven years ago, is that hackers are finding new vulnerabilities every day.

Therefore, read the book not to learn specific vulnerabilities in specific products, but to change your attitudes and gain a new resolve. And, of course, read the book to be entertained, awed, amazed at the continually surprising exploits of these wickedly clever hackers.

This book is easy to understand with plain English and technology terminologies. Instead of using their combined creative talent to develop stories and anecdotes to illustrate the dangers of social engineering and what business can do to mitigate it, both Mitnick and Simon relied heavily on interviewing former hackers, phone phreaks, and hackers turned security professionals.

Personally, I like to read this kind of book; espionage and deceive activities, be it real story or fiction. A lot of things to learn from reading books like this one. One of the moral you can learn is if you are in charge of information security for workgroup or company, you have to assume that some malicious adversary, including someone inside your organization, is looking for small crack in the wall and the weakest link of your security chain to break your network, to phreak the telephone system, to spy your other security features, and etc.

Publisher: Wiley Publishing, Inc (www.wiley.com), February 2005
ISBN: 0-7645-6959-7, 270 pages
Category: Computer/Internet Security