Why This Book?
If you know the enemy and know yourself,
you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
If you know yourself but not the enemy,
for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself,
you will succumb in every battle.
—Sun Tzu, Art of War
Translation and commentary by Lionel Giles (part of Project Gutenberg)
"Golly Gee!" you might be thinking. "Why write a book on hacking? You'll just encourage
them to attack more!" I respect your concern, but unfortunately there are some flaws
behind this logic. Let's face it—the malicious attackers have all the information they need
to do all kinds of nasty things. If they don't have the information now, they can get it easily
enough on the Internet through a variety of Web sites, mailing lists, and newsgroups
devoted to hacking, using a variety of the Web sites we discuss in Chapter 13, The Future,
References, and Conclusions. Experienced attackers often selectively share information
with new attackers to get them started in the craft. Indeed, the communication channels
in the computer underground among attackers are often far better than the
communication among computer professionals like you and me. This book is one way to
help make things more even.
My purpose here is not to create an army of barbarian hackers mercilessly bent on world
domination. The focus of this book is on defense, but to create an effective defense, we
must understand the offensive tools used by our adversaries. By seeing how the tools truly
work and understanding what they can do, not only can we better see the needs for good
defenses, but also we can better understand how the defensive techniques work.
This book is designed for system administrators, security personnel, and network
administrators whose jobs require them to defend their systems from attack. Additionally,
other curious folks who want to learn how attackers work and techniques for defending
their own systems against attacks can benefit. The book includes practical
recommendations for people who have to deal with the care and feeding of systems,
keeping them running and keeping the bad guys out, ranging from home users to operators
Chapter 1. Introduction Page 3 Return to Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction
Counter Hack Reloaded, Second Edition: A Step-by-Step Guide to Computer Attacks and
Effective Defenses By Ed Skoudis, Tom Liston ISBN: 9780131481046 Publisher: Prentice
Hall
Prepared for Zhigang Wang, Safari ID: michael7736@gmail.com
Print Publication Date: 2005/12/23 User number: 1659926 Copyright 2008, Safari Books Online, LLC.
This PDF is exclusively for your use in accordance with the Safari Terms of Service. No part of it may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior
written permission for reprints and excerpts from the publisher. Redistribution or other use that violates the fair use priviledge under U.S. copyright laws (see 17 USC107) or that
otherwise violates the Safari Terms of Service is strictly prohibited.
of corporate and government environments. With this understanding, we can work to
create an environment where effective defensive techniques are commonplace, and not
the exception. As good ol' Sun Tzu said, you must understand your enemy's capabilities
and your own. For each offensive technique described in this book, we'll also describe realworld
defenses. You can measure your own security capabilities against these defenses to
see how you stack up. Where your policies, procedures, and technologies fall short, you
can implement appropriate defenses to protect against the enemy. And that's what this
book is all about: Learning what the attackers do so we can defend ourselves.
Why Cover These Specific Tools and Techniques?
There are thousands of different computer and network attack tools available today, and
tens of thousands of different exploit techniques. To address this flood of possible attacks,
this book focuses on particular genres of attack tools and techniques, examining the most
widely used and most damaging tools from each category. By learning in depth how to
defend against the nastiest tools and techniques in each category, we will be defending
against all related tools in the category. For example, there are hundreds of methods
available that let an attacker hide on a machine by transforming the operating system itself,
using tools called rootkits. Rather than describing each and every individual rootkit
available today, we analyze in a greater level of detail some of the most powerful and widely
used rootkit tools in Chapter 10, Phase 4: Maintaining Access. By learning about and
properly defending against these specimens, you will go a long way in securing your
systems against other related rootkit attacks. In the same way, by learning about the most
powerful tools in other categories, we can design and implement the most effective
defenses.
How This Book Differs
In recent years, several books have been released covering the topic of attackers and their
techniques. Some of these books are well written and quite useful in helping readers
understand how attacks work and highlighting defenses. Why add another book to the
shelf addressing these topics? I'm glad you asked. This book is focused on being different
in several ways, including these:
• Being more like an encyclopedia instead of a dictionary. Other books in this genre
cover thousands of tools, with a paragraph or page on each tool. As described in the
previous section, this book focuses on understanding each category of tool in much
more depth. Therefore, whereas other books act like fantastic dictionaries of attack
tools and defenses, this book aims to be more of an encyclopedia, describing the attack
process in more detail and providing the overall architecture of attacks. By covering
each category of attack tool and the overall attack architecture in more detail, we can
better understand the appropriate defenses. But, the book isn't designed to be just an
encyclopedia. We don't want this book to be merely a giant tome on your shelf
Chapter 1. Introduction Page 4 Return to Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction
Counter Hack Reloaded, Second Edition: A Step-by-Step Guide to Computer Attacks and
Effective Defenses By Ed Skoudis, Tom Liston ISBN: 9780131481046 Publisher: Prentice
Hall
Prepared for Zhigang Wang, Safari ID: michael7736@gmail.com
Print Publication Date: 2005/12/23 User number: 1659926 Copyright 2008, Safari Books Online, LLC.
This PDF is exclusively for your use in accordance with the Safari Terms of Service. No part of it may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without the prior
written permission for reprints and excerpts from the publisher. Redistribution or other use that violates the fair use priviledge under U.S. copyright laws (see 17 USC107) or that
otherwise violates the Safari Terms of Service is strictly prohibited.
gathering dust, occasionally used as a reference. Instead, we aim to provide the
material in an interesting and educational manner, helping bring readers up to speed
with the myriad of attacks we face and real-world methods for handling them in an
effective manner.
• Presenting a phased view of attacks. Other books present a view of how attackers
gain access to systems, focusing on the penetration portion of an attack. Although
gaining access is an incredibly important element of most attacks, our adversaries do
much more than simply gain access. Once access is gained, most attackers manipulate
the system to maintain access and work hard to cover their tracks. This book covers
the attack sequence end-to-end by presenting a phased approach to attacking, so we
can cover defenses at each stage of a siege. Most attacks follow a general outline that
includes reconnaissance, scanning, gaining access, maintaining access, and covering
the tracks. This book describes each phase in detail.
• Covering scenarios for how the tools are used together. The tools used by attackers
are a little like building blocks; each one fills a specific (but limited) purpose. Only by
seeing how attackers build complete attacks out of the little blocks can we understand
how to best defend ourselves. Sophisticated attackers take individual building blocks
of tools and combine them in creative ways to devise very elegant attacks. This book
describes how the tools are used together with its phased view of an attack.
Additionally, Chapter 12, Putting It All Together: Anatomy of an Attack, presents
several scenarios describing how these tools are used together in the wild to
undermine systems.
• Using analogies to illustrate the underlying computer concepts. Throughout the
book, I have used analogies to highlight how various technologies work. Although
some of the analogies are certainly cheesy, I hope they make the material more
interesting and accessible to readers.
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