Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Academically solid, well researched, yet practical
Comment: Crimeware by Jakobsson and Ramzan sets a new standard for security books. It is both eminently pragmatic and at the same time, a scholarly work. I thought I knew a bit about malware, but I learned tons from the book. I struggled a bit with 16.2 Crimeware-Resistant Authentication and encourage the authors to take another look at that when they do second edition and this book simply must have a second edition. It will also be interesting to see if the taxonomy, chapter 2 takes hold. It would seem like we need a bit more of a classification system than Joanna Rutkowska's type 1 - 3 for our community.
The book gets right down to it, most authors waste the first few chapters with background information. Now to be sure, this is background, but it is pretty deep background. My favorite chapter is 7, botnets, but 6.3 JavaScript is very well done and immediately useful information to know. For a high speed pass, chapter 8 rootkits will get you up to speed, but that needs a whole lot more material to really cover the topic.
As this is an election year, and a crazy one at that, chapter 10 is a must read, it details a number of ways the election could be impacted, I think a bit about evoting machines might make a scary chapter even scarier. As soon as I finish this review, I need to send a note to a friend of mine concerned about click fraud, the authors do a great job on that in chapter 11.
And the best thing, the authors do not just tell you how bad things are, they spend a lot of time talking about defense. And if I can offer a thank you to the fifty or so researchers that helped with the book, thank you very much, the defensive information community is far better off for your efforts. A must own, must read, must read soon if there ever was such a thing. Order it now!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Great book for knowing how the bad guys are working overtime
Comment: If you are looking for a book to show you what the bad guys are doing with computers to steal data or comprise systems then this is the book for you.
I really enjoyed chapter 7 on Bot Networks. Like most of the other chapters it covers the basics of the topic, then digs deeper into the workings of the subject. And if you really want deep detail the ending sections go into extremely deep details (the book says these sections may only be of interest to security researchers). Some of the ending sections were over my head. But, the ones I did understand opened my eyes to those topics in a different light.
This book will be on my reference shelf for quite sometime due to the detail and range of topics covered.
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