Although most people don't give security much attention until their personal or business systems are attacked, this thought-provoking anthology demonstrates that digital security is not only worth thinking about, it's also a fascinating topic. Criminals succeed by exercising enormous creativity, and those defending against them must do the same.Beautiful Security explores this challenging subject with insightful essays and analysis on topics that The underground economy for personal how it works, the relationships among criminals, and some of the new ways they pounce on their prey How social networking, cloud computing, and other popular trends help or hurt our online security How metrics, requirements gathering, design, and law can take security to a higher level The real, little-publicized history of PGP This book includes contributions Peiter "Mudge" Zatko Jim Stickley Elizabeth Nichols Chenxi Wang Ed Bellis Ben Edelman Phil Zimmermann and Jon Callas Kathy Wang Mark Curphey John McManus James Routh Randy V. Sabett Anton Chuvakin Grant Geyer and Brian Dunphy Peter Wayner Michael Wood and Fernando Francisco All royalties will be donated to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
This book is a collection of 16 essays from different writers. Essays were fairly short and well written. However, I found only about one third of the essays interesting. Especially Mudge's "Psychological Security Traps" and Curphey's "Tomorrow's Security Cogs and Levers" were great. Other topics included for example security metrics, honeyclients, evolution of PGP web of trust and software security. I'm bit disappointed, because so many of essays were either trivial or non-interesting to me, but since the overall quality of texts were good, I'll recommend the book anyway.
This book was pretty bad. As with many collections of chapters by disparate authors, this quality was highly variable. There were a couple of bright spots but overall it was pretty terrible. It isn't clear who the target audience for this book is. It seems targetted at either CIOs or others who have a passing interest in very shallow security or newcomers to the field that have a business or consulting background. This book isn't very technical.
A very pragmatic book on real-world computer security issues, directed more toward black-hat intrusion than privacy or other issues. Not particularly what I was looking for, but probably perfectly good for what it is.