Know Your Enemy: Revealing the Security Tools, Tactics, and Motives of the Blackhat Community - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201746131 ISBN 13: 9780201746136

Publisher: Addison-Wesley, 2001

Synopsis

Aimed at both security professionals and those with a non-technical background, this book teaches the technical skills needed to study a blackhat attack and learn from it. Softcover. CD-ROM included.

About this title

About the Author

The Honeynet Project is a group of thirty security professionals dedicated to learning the tools, tactics, and motives of blackhats and sharing those lessions learned. Each individual in the group has unique skills, experiences, and backgrounds that contribute to the project. 0201746131AB07172001

From the Back Cover

For centuries, military organizations have relied on scouts to gather intelligence about the enemy. The scouts' mission was to find out who the enemy was, what they were doing, how they might attack, the weapons they use, and their ultimate objectives. Time and again this kind of data has proven critical in defending against, and defeating, the enemy.

In the field of information security, scouts have never existed. Very few organizations today know who their enemy is or how they might attack; when they might attack; what the enemy does once they compromise a system; and, perhaps most important, why they attack.

The Honeynet Project is changing this. A research organization of thirty security professionals, the group is dedicated to learning the tools, tactics, and motives of the blackhat community. As with military scouts, the mission is to gather valuable information about the enemy.

The primary weapon of the Honeynet Project is the Honeynet, a unique solution designed to capture and study the blackhat's every move. In this book you will learn in detail not only what the Honeynet Project has discovered about adversaries, but also how Honeynets are used to gather critical information.

Know Your Enemy includes extensive information about

• The Honeynet: A description of a Honeynet; information on how to plan, build, and maintain one; and coverage of risks and other related issues.
• The Analysis: Step-by-step instructions on how to capture and analyze data from a Honeynet.
• The Enemy: A presentation of what the project learned about the blackhat community, including documented compromised systems.

Aimed at both security professionals and those with a nontechnical background, this book teaches the technical skills needed to study a blackhat attack and learn from it. The CD includes examples of network traces, code, system binaries, and logs used by intruders from the blackhat community, collected and used by the Honeynet Project.

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Have you ever wondered what motivates blackhats, often called hackers, to attack, compromise, and exploit systems or what hackers do once they own them? Well, the purpose of this book is to teach you about this enemy, aka the blackhat. These individuals are attempting to use Internet technology to carry out illegal, destructive, or unauthorized activities. This activity could be as simple as a teenager attempting to vandalize Web sites, a sophisticated attempt at compromising credit card companies, or terrorist attacks against a country's infrastructure. Regardless of who you are--a homeowner with a cable modem connection, a security administrator for a large organization, or an information warfare officer for the military--these threats are for real. This book will teach you the tools, tactics, and motives of these threats: to know your enemy.

This book is the result of a 2-year project known as the Honeynet Project. What makes our research unique is that we let the blackhat community teach us how they operate. Instead of trying to guess who the enemy is and to develop theories on how blackhats think and operate, we have them teach us their tools, tactics, and motives. Our primary method for learning is the Honeynet, a collection of production systems designed to be compromised. When the bad guys probe, attack, and compromise our systems, we watch and learn from their every step. In the past two years, we have learned a great deal from having had numerous systems probed, attacked, and compromised. This book is an attempt to share those lessons. In addition, we have created the Web site project.honeynet/book/. This site will contain any additional information relative to this book, such as corrections or updates, and unabridged text of the chat sessions in Chapter 11.

For those of you without a technical background, this book will show you in simple terms how the bad guys accomplish what they do. You do not have to understand all the technical details to learn how the enemy operates and thinks. We will also teach you some of the technical skills necessary to study an attack and to learn from it. For those of you with technical backgrounds, we will develop your skill sets in capturing and analyzing data, such as forensic analysis. However, the end goal is the same regardless of your skill set: to teach you what we have learned about the blackhat community and how we learned it. We hope that by better understanding the enemy, you can better defend against attack.

This book has three parts. In Part I, we cover step-by-step how we plan, build, and maintain a Honeynet and the risk/issues involved. In Part II, we show you step-by-step how we use a Honeynet and how we learn from it, specifically, data analysis. In Part III, we cover what we have learned about the blackhat community, including several specific examples of compromised honeypots. We discuss as little theory as possible, instead focusing on the actions of the blackhats we have witnessed and the lessons we have learned. We hope that you learn as much from this book as we have learned from the blackhat community. 0201746131P08212001

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0201746131
• ISBN 13: 9780201746136
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328
• Editor: Honeynet Project