Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating: 
Summary: An essential A-Z guide for forensic investigations
Comment: There is a real lack of well written books in this category, and this one stands out because it is comprehensive, yet easy to digest and carefully laid out, including case studies to understand data capture and analysis techniques.
The progression of the chapters mirror an investigative process; there is discussion of how to properly handle digital evidence, how to make a duplicate of the source data, and how to make sense of what you have collected. There are many real-world type case studies in the beginning of the book that could easily read off the front of any newspaper, and the captured evidence is on the included DVD for you to search to find the "smoking gun". Very well done.
The book takes the unusual role of discussing not only the more popular commercial tools like EnCase or Forensic Tool Kit, but also all the open source tools available for free, which is a real plus if you don't have the deep pockets required for the retail products. The book also does an excellent job of explaining the advantages and shortcomings of all the products discussed, something not often seen in technical books. Along with the open source discussion are source web sites for downloading the tools. The accompanying DVD is packed with stuff to get you started. The book is filled with well illustrated screen shots to help you orient yourself when trying the programs yourself.
Be forewarned, this book assumes a pretty reasonable amount of technical knowledge and while it addresses the commercial products available on the Win32 platform, a lot of tools and utilities referenced are written for Linux. While a novice investigator can certainly find value in the book, there is a lot of "meat" that even a seasoned professional will find useful.
This is definitely the best book currently available on data forensic investigations.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Will educate and wow!
Comment: Bejtlich, Jones and Rose 'Real Digital Forensics' is as practical as a printed book can be. In a very methodical fashion, the authors cover live response (Unix, Windows), network-based forensics following the NSM model (Unix, Windows), forensics duplication, common forensics analysis techniques (such as file recovery and Internet history review), hostile binary analysis (Unix, Windows), creating a forensics toolkit and PDA, flash and USB drive forensics. Is that it? :-)Well, there is some other fun stuff too. In other words, the book is both comprehensive and in-depth; following the text and trying the investigations using the enclosed DVD definitely presents an effective way to learn forensic techniques. I would recommend the book to all security professionals (even those not directly involved with forensics on a daily basis).
Anton Chuvakin, Ph.D., GCIA, GCIH, GCFA is a Security Strategist with a major security company. He is an author of the book "Security Warrior" and a contributor to "Know Your Enemy II" and the upcoming "Hacker's Challenge III". In his spare time, he maintains his security portal info-secure.org and his blog at O'Reilly. His next book will be about security log analysis.
Customer Rating:
Summary: the DVD's data is crucial for you to tackle
Comment: There have been several authoritative books on computer forensics. (Including "Tao of Network Security Monitoring" by Bejtlich.) But this "Real Digital Forensics" book breaks new ground. Not in the theoretical modelling of an attack or countermeasures against it. Instead, there are several indepth case studies, that key off data given in the book's DVD. And the latter is a DVD, not a CD. The authors needed the multigigabyte capacity to store the provided data. Even then, these are compressed. This should give you some feeling of the book's emphasis.
The authors address a serious lack in this field. How does someone [you] gain experience analysing a real attack? Without already being employed at a company experiencing such an event? In response, the authors made several scenarios that, they claim, reflect what actual attackers would likely have done.
This is an experimental book. There is no overarching elegant theory. You are meant to roll up your sleeves and tackle each case. En route, the book shows how, as a defender, you can use several open source packages to dissect the attack, as well as impose countermeasures. Which is another nice feature. Those packages are free. It makes your forensics education very cheap, in terms of explicit capital outlay.
Which is not to say that the book ignores commercial forensic tools. But the authors have a clear preference for open source, with which you might well concur.
|
|
|
