“Security books, quite frankly, are pretty much a dime a dozen,
most of which are written by people in IT field security. What
immediately separates this book from the rest is the background of
the author. Ms. Bace is an ex-government employee, spending 12
years in everyone’s favorite spook organization, the National
Security Agency. She led the Computer Misuse and Anonmaly Detection
(CMAD) Research Program for six years at the NSA. She also
collaborated on Computer Crime : A Crimefighter’s Handbook by Dr.
David Icove of the FBI. She also won the Distinguished Leadership
Award in 1995 from the NSA.”
“This book is sort of dry reading. It’s akin to reading college
CS textbooks for pleasure. Or law books. What I didn’t like is the
fact that she wasn’t real clear on the distinction of “hackers”,
nor how she describes them. She worries that “hackers” wish to
“corrupt the trust process”. And the focus for the book is not
primarily for techies. It’s designed for CIO smacking….”
“What made this good for me was the fact that I could have
points to show to management for InfoSec issues. I work in a
hospital and we tend to attract a large amount of famous people as
patients. If something damaging was leaked to the media about a
famous person’s medical condition that was potentially embarassing,
we’re looking at a good multi-million dollar lawsuit. This book
isn’t a by-the-book “How to protect your systems”, but more of a
book on what to safeguard, and how to detect patterns that may
indicate patterns of unauthorized usage.“