Resources

Suggested Reading

Books

				My review
			My review	My review

Papers

In my travels and teaching engagements, I am appalled to find so many who don’t know of what I speak when I mention “the Morris Worm” or “the Internet Worm.” A collection of papers exists at Purdue U. on the CERIAS web site. You need to look for them with the search engine as it warns that individual pages will be moved for your convenience. I have duplicated Gene Spafford’s technical report on the Worm here.

For firewalls, I believe the early papers are still the best, and the technology has not changed substantially since their authors wrote them. Four of the first and best papers are:

“The Design of a Secure Internet Gateway,” by Bill Cheswick (1990).
“There Be Dragons,” by Steve Bellovin (1992).
“Thinking About Firewalls,” by Marcus Ranum (1993).
“A Network Firewall,” by Marcus Ranum (1992).

Rik Farrow, Understanding buffer overflow attacks is an excellent explanation of what they are and how they work. A reprint from Rik’s “Network Defense” column.

Links

(Some of these have pop-ups and other advertisements.)

IPAddressGuide.com. Free on-line IP network tools.

WindowSecurity.com. Windows security site for IT admins. WindowSecurity.com provides Windows security news, articles, tutorials, software listings and reviews for information security professionals covering topics such as firewalls, viruses, intrusion detection and other security topics.

The All-Internet-Security.com Directory — “Better Resources for Better Decisions.”

ITtoolbox Security. “ITtoolbox Security offers forums for technical discussion, an integrated directory, white papers and daily news geared towards Security professionals and users of Security products. The portal also provides content, community, job postings and much more.”

Sam Spade. Tools to track down attackers and spammers. There are web-based tools and a Windows program to download. (Goes well with the paper I wrote — Tracing Electronic Mail — for the US Secret Service to help trace threatening e-mail sent to any of the princpals under their protection.

ICSA Labs virus hoax page and Symantec AntiVirus Research Center, Virus Hoaxes page . Check it out here before sending the warning to all of your friends and relations… Please?

The SANS Institute

CSI — The Computer Security Institute

CERIAS (Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security) at Purdue University.

ICSA Labs (A Division of TruSecure Corporation). Certification of sites, products, and professionals. Good introduction and advanced resource for IT security matters.

CIAC Security Web Site CIAC stands for Computer Incident Advisory Capability, and they are part of the US Department of Energy … the nuclear people.

NIST Computer Security Resources Clearinghouse

Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters!

searchSecurity — “The Security Specific Search Engine”

The IETF Security Area The IETF Security Area Home Page.

Son of Devil’s Advocate. Years after I stopped caring, and having to care, about who had the best UNIX workstation or what UNIX version would win, I continued to read Stan Kelly-Bootle’s column, “The Devil’s Advocate,” in UNIX Review, and, after a name change, Performance Computing magazine. Often it was the only part of UR/PC I read. The magazine ceased to exist in January 2000 (or 19100, depending on whether the programmers of your system read the manual), but Stan’s columns live on at http://www.sarcheck.com/. From their home page you can jump to SODA — Son of Devil’s Advocate. I heartily recommend bookmarking it and reading it.