Great perspective on high-tech crimes., November 19, 1999

What a practical and informative book. It’s about time a book has been written that is not interwoven with conjecture and idealistic gibberish. This book has substance and is very relevant to the real world of crime in the technological environment. The authors’ ability to provide such a broad perspective about the subject in such an understandable fashion is appreciated and refreshing. The authors provide a precise overview of the entire high-technology crime investigatory process. This book not only deals with a myriad of important issues but also offers viable solutions and prevention programs which have already been tested. It contains information that is applicable, not only to security professionals, but to law enforcement as well. Let’s face it, “high-tech” crime will undoubtedly flourish in the next century. Managers and investigators from law enforcement and industry must have – at least – a basic understanding of the implications of this type of crime and the global information environment before they can effectively react to it. Protecting the assets of the public and private sectors will become higher priorities because the stakes are becoming higher and thieves will continually attempt to take advantage of new and existing technology to commit their crimes. As we move into the next century, the challenge will be to understand and aggressively respond to high-technology crime.

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Waste of time, January 24, 2000

After reading the reviews of the book, I was really looking forward for receiving it. However, it turned out to be a big disappointment. It may improve towards the end, but the first chapters were of so bad standard I gave up reading it.

Don’t have the book here right now so I can’t tell the pages, but in the first few chapters I was told that acceptable use of fire arms (authors claim IT is just like fire arms as it can be used for good and bad) is a police killing an offender that might kill someone else (ever heard of the theory of deterrence?), that phreakers (i.e. those hacking telephone systems for free calls) are the major threat for global information infrastructure security, CERT archives are the major source of information for hackers, SATAN etc. (including outdated Crack) are significant hacker tools, WWW is just a number of screens connected to each other, being given only ping attack as an example of denial of service, spent pages on calculating how many books fit into hard drives of different sizes (Assumption was that a book contains almost 1000 pages, then it was reduced 500 pages, this book is around 300 pages), and was generally being subjected to a number of unjustified claims about computer crime and computer criminals that seem to be if not all wrong, at least so simple unlikely to educate anyone to understand crime in GII.

As I said, the book may improve but I am not intending on finding out. The US centricity doesn’t help, either. I’d rather get back to other sources of computer crime information that are more accurate and comprehensive.

Luckily, there are a number of good books around. For an introduction to computer crime, I recommend Icove, Seger and VonStorch: Computer Crime, A Crime Fighter’s handbook (O’Reilly and Associates 1995). For a number of case studies and examples of computer crime, get Denning’s Information Warfare and Security (Addison-Wesley 1999). For the scope of economical espionage and information warfare capacities of countries other than US Check Adams’s The Next World War (Arrow Books Limited, 1998). To properly understand that national information infrastructure, nations’ dependence on it and inherent vulnerabilities, get your hands on to Schneider’s (ed.) Trust in Cyberspace (National Academy Press, 1999). If you want to know the extent of computer crime, go to CSI/FBI computer crime survey online.

It is widely assumed that law enforcement personnel is not properly educated to handling computer crime. If this is the case, authors should be especially carefull to treat security technology and vulnerabilities appropriately. Simplifications and unjustified assumptions don’t help much. Therefore, it’s better spend time on the above books and WWW site and get a more comprehensive picture of computer crime.

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