Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 445 pages
- Published by: Syngress
- Edition: 1st Edition June 1, 2005
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 1597490202
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-1597490207
-
Book Dimensions:
9 x 7 x 1 inches
- Weighs: 1.6 pounds
Book Description
This book will cover customizing Snort to perform intrusion detection and prevention; Nessus to analyze the network layer for vulnerabilities; and Ethereal to sniff their network for malicious or unusual traffic. The book will also contain an appendix detailing the best of the rest open source security tools. Each of these tools is intentionally designed to be highly customizable so that users can torque the programs to suit their particular needs. Users can code their own custom rules, plug-ins, and filters that are tailor-made to fit their own networks and the threats which they most commonly face. The book describes the most important concepts of coding and customizing tools, and then provides readers with invaluable working scripts that can either be used as is or further refined by using knowledge gained from the book.
Product Description
If you have Snort, Nessus, and Ethereal up and running and now you're ready to customize, code, and torque these tools to their fullest potential, then this book is for you. The authors of this book provide the inside scoop on coding the most effective and efficient Snort rules, Nessus plug-ins with NASL, and Ethereal capture and display filters. When done with this book, you will be a master at coding your own tools to detect malicious traffic, scan for vulnerabilities, and capture only the packets YOU really care about.
Each chapter contains dozens of working code examples. Snort is an amazingly flexible application with a rules-based engine allowing you to collect and correlate packets based on the rules you design. The Snort rules section of this book teaches you to read, write, and understand these rules for your IDS sensors. You will learn rule development schematics, proper testing procedures, techniques for enhancing the speed of your rules, and tips for using Berkeley Packet Filters and subnet masks within a rule.
The Nessus Attack Scripting Language (NASL) allows you to create self contained scripts for vulnerability scanning using the Nessus engine (nessusd). NASL allows you to write plug-ins that perform network security checks and almost any other type of network-wide test. In this section, you will learn the intricacies of the "script description" and "script body," the NASL Protocol APIs, string manipulation, and more. Ethereal provides "capture filters," which allow you to capture only the packets you are interested in and "display filters," which allow you to specify which packets are then shown in Ethereal's Graphical User Interface. This section teaches you to write capture filters and how to work with tcpdump; host names and addresses; MAC addresses; ports; logical operations; protocols; and protocol fields.
Reader ReviewsI've read and reviewed the three previous books in Jay Beale's Open Source Security Series -- Snort 2.1, Nessus Network Auditing, and Ethereal Packet Sniffing. I liked all three of those books, and I'm glad to say that this fourth book -- Nessus, Snort, and Ethereal Power Tools (NSAEPT), is a worthy continuation of Jay's series. NSAEPT is a unique resource for anyone who wants to extend Nessus, Snort, and Ethereal. The book could save programmers hours of work, and it should be the first step for those looking to contribute to the development of all three projects. It's unfortunate that an uninformed three star review has been the only commentary on NSAEPT until now. Of course the book is not for beginners! Why write another introductory book, when the three earlier titles serve that role (and more)? NSAEPT is strong precisely because it starts where the other three books end. I learned quite a bit reading NSAEPT. For example, Part I shared advice on using Nessus to audit hosts directly, by examining Windows registry keys, package databases, or Windows PE files (.exe, .dll) directly. I appreciated the discussion of creating NASL checks that were more protocol-aware (for MySQL) or that could speak NTLM authentication to IIS Web servers. Ch 6 even gave tips on building NASL generators. Part II, covering Snort, gave better advice on writing Snort rules than what was found in the earlier Snort 2.1 book. I thought this part was the weakest of the three, however. I would have liked to have seen many more examples of using advanced Snort rule options. Table 8.10 should have said that the + flag means "match on the specified flags, and allow any other flags." Also, I thought the author miscommunicated the purpose of the stream4 preprocessor when he mentioned dropping UDP and ICMP traffic. That's an issue when running inline, not passively as most people use Snort. I really liked Part III, which examined Ethereal. Ch 11 offered great guidance on reverse engineering an unknown trace format, namely iptrace from AIX 3. Ch 12 mentioned an undocumented tethereal flag (-G) that was new to me. I enjoyed learning about tap modules in Ch 13, and I did not know that Ethereal uses the wiretap library to read traces -- not libpcap. I subtracted one star from my review for a few reasons. First, NSAEPT features some really annoying formatting problems in many of the code listings. Every place the characters "FI" (any case) appear, they are changed into a single nonsensical character. I stopped counting the number of times this happened. For example, where one should read "Filename", we see instead "Xlename". The same seems to have happened with "FL"; e.g., "Flags" becomes "Xags". The reference to libpcap and "Chapter 1" on p 159 should instead point to Ch 11. I thought the inclusion of material from Brian Wotring's Host Integrity Monitoring book as Appendix A was unnecessary. Brian's book is great, but I don't think readers need thirty pages from another title. Is that just padding? Format-wise, NSAEPT features smaller fonts than one sees in more recent Syngress books. I thought the font was a little small, but in some ways an improvement over the jumbo text seen elsewhere. I also thought the paper used to print NSAEPT was much better than other titles. Compare NSAEPT with another 440 page Syngress book, Securing IM and P2P Applications for the Enterprise, and you'll see the latter book is much thicker. Overall I recommend NSAEPT to anyone who wishes to do more with Nessus, Snort, or Ethereal. NSAEPT is definitely a book for power users and developers. It's great to see a new book that starts with original material and avoids rehashing what's already been written.
Search for books at
