Beautiful Security: Leading Security Experts Explain How They Think

by Andy Oram, John Viega

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 underground economy for personal how it works, the relationships among criminals, and some of the new ways they pounce on their preyHow social networking, cloud computing, and other popular trends help or hurt our online securityHow metrics, requirements gathering, design, and law can take security to a higher levelThe real, little-publicized history of PGPThis book includes contributions Mudge ZatkoJim StickleyElizabeth NicholsChenxi WangEd BellisBen EdelmanPhil Zimmermann and Jon CallasKathy WangMark CurpheyJohn McManusJames RouthRandy V. SabettAnton ChuvakinGrant Geyer and Brian DunphyPeter WaynerMichael Wood and Fernando FranciscoAll royalties will be donated to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Genres: Programming, Technology, Nonfiction, Technical, Hackers, Reference, Coding

302 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Jari Pirhonen]

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.

[Noe Nieto]

I haven't finished yet

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few gems but I'm not sure there were enough to make it worth it. It is also a bit dated but a lot of the same problems still exist.

[Four Flynn · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Shannon Appelcline · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Alan]

http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?...

[mono · Rating 2 out of 5]

Should be titled "Random Collection of Quasi Security Tangents With Absolutely No Neuroscience Involved".

[Osama · Rating 5 out of 5]

g33k in learning

[Elijah Oyekunle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is fantastic!