I had not read either of the first two books in this series -- Stealing the Network: How to Own the Box or Stealing the Network: How to Own a Continent. Based on the promos, the list of ten authors and editors, and the publisher (Syngress-O'Reilly - "an independent publisher of print and electronic reference materials for information technology professionals seeking skill enhancement and career advancement."), I thought Stealing the Network: How to Own an Identity was a factual technical book about security and identity theft. It's not. It is a work of fiction. Even after reading the "dust jacket" and the author bios, and the chapter summaries, it was not until page xxiii of the Foreward that they finally hit me over the head with it: "It's hard to believe that this is a fictional book." Perhaps it is a genre that should have its own name - geek fiction! And it would take some pretty savvy geeks to follow the more technical twists and turns.
With ten authors one might expect that the presentation would be a bit uneven. It is. The book reads more like a series of loosely connected short stories than a novel. And most of the short stories cannot be fully appreciated without a hefty knowledge of Unix programming and hardware systems. You need to know basic Unix commands, the syntax, and the lingo. If you don't know a considerable amount about IP addresses, encryption, security, sniffers, routers, and the TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms such as USB, LAN, PGP, DNS, SSL, SSH, DEP, SUA, SDP, PAN, DSL, DCE, TTL, FFM), you may find yourself quickly snowed.
The primary theme is identity theft. At one point the baddie, "Knuth" (har, har), cons a 16-year-old hacker into stealing the personal information of 40,000 students at a major technical university. Much of the technical details are fact-based, but it strains credulity when the young hacker is able to read and re-engineer errorless code for a major system during an "all nighter". There are a small number of footnotes that document, with web references, the mundane (the origin of the term "black list") to the arcane (the hijacking of DNS records from Network Solutions).
Here is a snippet of how it goes:
"Holy crap," Blain murmured as his eyes bounced between the file names and the commands being executed, "he's modding the ssh source code! He's making a Trojan ssh client!" Once the files were modified, Flir compiled the OpenSSH and pushed the SSH binary up to the ~mrash/Public/Drop\ Box/.shells directory on mac3. Flir's commands continued. ~mrash/Public/Drop\ Box/.shells/zsh-wstearns cp ~mrash/Public/Drop\ Box/.shells/ssh ~/bin/ echo "export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc ps aux1 | grep wstearns kill -9 566 exit
For better or worse, Dan Brown (author of The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons) has nothing to worry about from these ten authors when it comes to high-tech thrillers. The market for this genre of fiction appears to be very limited. Brown managed to make his novels interesting by weaving a plausible plot with technical details that everyone can relate to. These authors have failed on both scores. Also, the copy editor has missed spelling and grammatical errors, making the final product seem like a half-hearted effort. But if you like taking a literary break from your Unix programming (without really taking a break) this may be the book for you.
Stealing the Network: How to Own an Identity
Book Reviewed by Nelson Weiderman. Nelson has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University. He taught computer science at the University of Rhode Island and worked as a
software engineer at the Software Engineering Institute. Currently, he heads a small web design firm called Noetic Harbor.
