Exploiting Software: How to Break Code Paperback – February 27, 2004

by Greg Hoglund

Excellent Book

Genres: Hackers, Programming, Technology, Technical, Nonfiction, Computers, Computer Science

Paperback Bunko

First published February 27, 2004

Reviews

[Brian Powell · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a catchy title. But it's also an inaccurate, disingenuous bait-and-switch. This is not a book about how to write exploits or malware. It does have a good bit of reverse engineering and debugging discussion within the context of IDA Pro (this is virtually all of Chapter 3, which is only useful if you have IDA Pro and care more about disassembling than crafting malware). As an analogy, imagine picking up a book on boating and finding that most of it was about how to take the engine apart.

The text is generally wordy and repetitive, not well-organized, and some topics that really should have been low-hanging fruit (like the nearly one hundred pages on buffer overflows) flounder and meander and never really get at the essence of the subject (FWIW: Erickson's "Hacking" is excellent on this topic). Happily, the closing chapter on Windows rootkits is interesting and there are some worked examples on how to develop and deploy rootkits on Windows XP. Overall, this book is like a growing band of modern cybersecurity books: it's fluffy and wordy, lacking solid, pragmatic content.

[Jacqueline · Rating 2 out of 5]

Outdated. Barely skims over certain topics, and repeats simple things throughout the book. It does things like throw pages full of sample IDA plugin code at the end one of the first chapters - despite later chapters at times tending to treat the reader like a novice. (Annoyingly, there's no source code or other examples available online - really?)

[Mack Asaga · Rating 3 out of 5]

*[ There's going to be a training regarding Software Security, so I want to learn something about it before I take it next week.- ]

[Tom]

Overall not bad, but more for someone who has never have done it.