Nitesh Dhanjani, Billy Rios, & Brett Hardin
5 stars
Good Intro to Next Gen Attacks
First Impressions...skinny book. Strike One. Chapter 1 -- "Intelligence Gathering: Peering Through the Windows to Your Organization" spends a lot of time on physical security and social engineering and no mention of Maltego. I'm not sure how anyone can write a book on Intelligence Gathering and NOT include Maltego. Strike Two.
At this point i was thinking I had a dud on my hands BUT Chapter 2 --- "Inside-Out Attacks: The Attacker Is the Insider" redeems. Tons of code and examples to make XSS work in "realistic" scenarios mix the right amount of tech and narrative. My only gripe was that they talked about using XSS shell for XSS exploitation instead of using BEeF which is actively maintained and developed.
All the other chapters (except for Chapter 3) were very good, none of the others are as technical as chapter 2 but I believe they cover the current trends in a entertaining and readable way. Like one reviewer mentioned the information covered in Chapter 5 -- "Cloud Insecurity: Sharing the Cloud with Your Enemy" was not what I expected. It covered high level "possible" attacks versus any "probable" attacks. With the exception of possibly making insecure VM's and getting people to run it. Chapter 7 -- "Infiltrating the Phishing Underground: Learning from Online Criminals?" was a "chapterfied" version of the authors talk on the subject. Chapter 4 -- "Blended Threats: When Applications Exploit Each Other" was a good overview of stringing vulnerabilities that would be/were not considered high risk into high risk issues by combining one or more together which actually is "next generation".
Chapter 3, IMO didnt cover anything new. Mostly a discussion of insecure protocols, arp spoofing, email spoofing. While still a relevant issue in security not "next generation".
