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Cybersecurity Humble Book Bundle

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So, I've read most of these. Here's a tour of what is definitely useful and what you should probably avoid.

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Do Read:

1. The Web Application Hacker's Handbook - It's beginning to show its age, but this is still absolutely the first book I'd point anyone to for learning practical application security.

2. Practical Reverse Engineering - Yep, this is great. As the title implies, it's a good practical guide and will teach many of the "heavy" skills instead of just a platform-specific book targeted to something like iOS. Maybe supplement with a tool-specific book like The IDA Pro Book.

3. Security Engineering - You can probably read either this or The Art of Software Security Assessment. Both of these are old books, but the core principles are timeless. You absolutely should read one of these, because they are like The Art of Computer Programming for security. Everyone says they have read them, they definitely should read them, and it's evident that almost no one has actually read them.

4. Shellcoder's Handbook - If exploit development if your thing, this will be useful. Use it as a follow-on from a good reverse engineering book.

5. Cryptography Engineering - The first and only book you'll really need to understand how cryptography works if you're a developer. If you want to make cryptography a career, you'll need more; this is still the first book basically anyone should pick up to understand a wide breadth of modern crypto.

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You Can Skip:

1. Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking - It was okay. I am biased against books that don't have a great deal of technical depth. You can learn a lot of this book by reading online resources and by honestly having common sense. A lot of this book is infosec porn, i.e. "Wow I can't believe that happened." It's not a bad book, per se, it's just not particularly helpful for a lot of technical security. If it interests you, read it; if it doesn't, skip it.

2. The Art of Memory Forensics - Instead of reading this, consider reading The Art of Software Security Assessment (a more rigorous coverage) or Practical Malware Analysis.

3. The Art of Deception - See above for Social Engineering.

4. Applied Cryptography - Cryptography Engineering supersedes this and makes it obsolete, full stop.

_________________

What's Not Listed That You Should Consider:

1. Gray Hat Python - In which you are taught to write debuggers, a skill which is a rite of passage for reverse engineering and much of blackbox security analysis.

2. The Art of Software Security Assessment - In which you are taught to find CVEs in rigorous depth. Supplement with resources from the 2010s era.

3. The IDA Pro Book - If you do any significant amount of reverse engineering, you will most likely use IDA Pro (although tools like Hopper are maturing fast). This is the book you'll want to pick up after getting your IDA Pro license.

4. Practical Malware Analysis - Probably the best single book on malware analysis outside of dedicated reverse engineering manuals. This one will take you about as far as any book reasonably can; beyond that you'll need to practice and read walkthroughs from e.g. The Project Zero team and HackerOne Internet Bug Bounty reports.

5. The Tangled Web - Written by Michal Zalewski, Director of Security at Google and author of afl-fuzz. This is the book to read alongside The Web Application Hacker's Handbook. Unlike many of the other books listed here it is a practical defensive book, and it's very actionable. Web developers who want to protect their applications without learning enough to become security consultants should start here.

6. The Mobile Application Hacker's Handbook - The book you'll read after The Web Application Hacker's Handbook to learn about the application security nuances of iOS and Android as opposed to web applications.

Actually a great comment. This is what I wish all those "awesome lists" were: lists written by people actually in the field who've actually read all the books they're recommending. Unlike the current state, which is lists compiled by people completely new to the field looking for easy github stars putting up every book they can find with a Google search.

Funny you mention that, because I'm currently working on a GitHub repo as a research aid for myself. It's a compendium of all major cryptographic primitives and constructions (protocols) and the current state of the art in cryptanalysis against them, sorted by type (i.e. symmetric:block cipher:AES).

On the one hand it's rather straightforward because much of the state of the art in crypto research is in eprint or open access. On the other hand there isn't really a sane "landscape document" that elucidates all of this information in one place because it's so scattered and hard to organize.

Specifically: imagine a straightforward document with a handy table of contents that e.g. explains what a given cryptographic primitive is at a high level and what the current state of the art in attacking it is, like so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2#Cryptanalysis_and_valida...

I don't know how useful this would be to someone not working on cryptography research because it's heavily descriptive and academic (unlike, say, Cryptographic Right Answers, which is a good prescriptive document for developers).

Maybe kind of akin to

http://valerieaurora.org/hash.html

but for constructions, and with more citations?

Cool, yeah that's a good resource. But it's a bit opinionated and focuses on general purpose hashing functions without coverage of symmetric and asymmetric encryption, digital signatures or password hashing functions. It also doesn't include some obvious contenders, like BLAKE2 (presumably because Keccak won the SHA-3 contest, but that's not a great reason). Other than that, a git repository format also has the handy benefit of pull requests in case one maintainer misses some new avant-garde attack.

While we're at it, a similar resource for benchmarking instead of cryptanalysis exists here: https://bench.cr.yp.to/. This is maintained by Daniel Bernstein, who is probably the single most qualified person to lead that sort of work.

It's really nice to have access to these kinds of summaries to understand these landscapes. So, thanks for that reference and thanks for working on another one.

Thomas H. Ptacek (Ptáček) wrote a 2015 update to 'Cryptographic Right Answers'.

https://gist.github.com/tqbf/be58d2d39690c3b366ad#ptacek-Cry...

Could you also lists the book from this bundle that you didn't read?

The books in the bundle that aren't listed in either category above are:

CEH v9: Certified Ethical Hacker Version 9 Study Guide

Malware Analyst's Cookbook and DVD: Tools and Techniques for Fighting Malicious Code

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World, 15th Anniversary Edition

Threat Modeling: Designing for Security

Unauthorised Access: Physical Penetration Testing For IT Security Teams

> Threat Modeling: Designing for Security

Very pleasant read. It's the kind of book I'd expect at university. Some background / history, explanations, presenting both the used and the slightly obsolete methods, (with explanation why they're worse) some practical hints. It's a good threat modelling 101 book in my opinion.

Sure. I've not read Threat Modeling, Malware Analyst's Cookbook and DVD, Unauthorized Access, Secrets and Lies and CEH v9 Study Guide.

Gray Hat Python was recently available in a massive Humble Bundle Python dump - now I'm very glad I picked it up!

While I agree with most of your comment, I think The Art of Memory Forensics is an absolute must read for the people that want to do digital forensics. Or attackers worrying about the footprint they leave behind...

The Art of Software Security Assessment is a great book, but it's on a totally different topic and there's zero comparison between these two.

The two books don't map to each other 1:1, but I'd consider a lot of the contents of TAOSSA to be very good foundational content for assessing malware. Much of malware is a practical implementation of faults explored within that book.

I second the reply above. I don't see much overlap between TAOSSA and Security Engineering. And I would absolutely recommend TAOSSA above Security Engineering. I'd almost go as far as to say that if you only read 1 book it should be TAOSSA, but really it depends what you want to do.

TAOSSA also has nothing to do with malware whatsoever. Are you perhaps thinking of a different book?

Also, I would point out that Shellcoders Handbook is extremely dated now. It was excellent in its time, but you won't be able to do much with that anymore. It could still be interesting background, but exploits and exploit mitigations have changed a lot in 13 years. We are talking Windows XP/2003 era.

For all of the flak that Applied Crypto gets, it's actually a very good book for what it is. It's just full of bad/outdated advice. For someone who wants a history lesson and plans to update their knowledge before engaging in malpractice based on what that book teaches, it's still a good read. Cryptography Engineering is a very different style of book. While also good, it doesn't get the reader excited about crypto in the way that Applied Cryptography did. AC also has quite a bit of background and explanation of very basic fundamentals, written for humans as opposed to programmers or math majors, that makes a lot of the ideas behind cryptography more accessible.

I'll clarify - I consider Security Engineering and TAOSSA to be landscape volumes - they cover a great deal of depth. Security Engineering is more on the defensive/development side while TAOSSA is on the offensive/assessment side. I agree with you that TAOSSA should be the one to read if you have to only read one.

With regard to malware analysis - TAOSSA teaches source code review to a depth that very few other texts approach in a useful way. Source code review - and the category of vulnerabilities that lend themselves to that assessment - is useful for malware analysis in turn because it teaches the reader what sort of issues malware might try to exploit in a system.

This focuses on the high end of malware - for rote malware analysis and incident response I agree it's not going to be helpful. Like I said, it's more of a foundational work.

Applied Cryptography is pop science. It's a book written breezily and unseriously, a sort of whirlwind tour of a subject its author is fascinated and engaged with, but without rigor. Approached on those terms, it's a fun read. I sure enjoyed it when it first came out.

Unfortunately, it's also a showcase for what can go wrong if you provide too much technical content in a pop science book. What happened with A.C. is similar to what you'd think might happen in a book about home anesthesiology, complete with resources to show you how you'd put someone under from first principles and household chemicals.

On the whole, because it's generally taken by its readers as authoritative and prescriptive, A.C. has done a lot more harm than good.

Cryptography Engineering is imperfect, too. But it was written seriously, accepting and engaging with the fact that readers will use it as a guidebook to serious implementation. It's a much safer book than Applied Cryptography.

Moreover, if you're serious about engaging with crypto in your career, it's a better book. You won't learn much about what goes wrong with crypto from Applied Cryptography, which happily documents a number of weak or even broken constructions and describes protocols and techniques that were obsolete years before the book was published. Cryptography Engineering is aware of much of the cryptographic literature, and almost every chapter concerns itself first and foremost with what goes wrong with crypto constructions. You can read it "inside out" as a sort of first course in attacking cryptosystems.

How would you suggest approaching these books in order to translate the "reading" into practical/demonstrable skills?

For instance, I'm currently working through The Web Application Hacker's Handbook and also trying things out with OWASP's Broken Web App VM's. I feel like the book is covering a lot more than the broken web apps do, and the broken webapps don't really give a ton of practice, although so far I've only gotten into the "Training" webapps (Mutillidae, Webgoat, DVWA etc), so maybe just digging into the "realistic" apps more will expose me to more of what's in the book. Just looking for some guidance on how to approach the reading-vs-doing divide.

Thanks for the advice.

Do CTFs.

I'll echo what the sibling comment said about CTFs. Those are a great way of drilling the theory in the same way you need to drill problems to really cement mathematical maturity.

Practically speaking, read through each chapter and then try to find an example of this vulnerability in an existing web application. Try bug bounties as well to get a feel for where real world developers make mistakes. A lot of information security is learning to challenge assumptions.

Some of those were on a no starch press humble bundle a while.back too

Seconding Practical Malware Analysis and adding a write-in for The Rootkit Arsenal, which is a very practical guide and walkthrough for building functional rootkits.

I picked up the IDA Pro book on a sweet deal before getting an IDA Pro license and it just makes me sad, since I don't exactly want to shell out for the license yet.

>5. The Tangled Web - Written by Michal Zalewski, Director of Security at Google and author of afl-fuzz. This is the book to read alongside The Web Application Hacker's Handbook. Unlike many of the other books listed here it is a practical defensive book, and it's very actionable. Web developers who want to protect their applications without learning enough to become security consultants should start here.

I just finished this book last night, this is an invaluable resource.

I'm a huge fan of the Tangled Web, but if you leverage stuff that modern browsers give you, you don't really need worry about most of the content discussed in the book. (I'm still a fan of the book from a web security history point of view).

Specifically, if you have CSP headers you can pretty much ignore XSS risks. Add something to handle CSRF (e.g. Original header or the more traditional cookie/post param) and you are golden.

I haven't read the web application hacker's handbook but I bet I'll reach a similar conclusion.

Is there a legal / not crazy expensive way to buy humble bundle books and get them printed on standard 8.5x11, bound in a series of binders / duotangs / twine? I'm going to buy the bundle, but greatly prefer physical pages to reading on a screen.

Ereaders are my solution, have a look at Kobo's

The OP said he wants physical, and I understand. For fiction or news, I am fine with my Kindle, but for tech manuals where I want to rapidly bookmark, highlight and reference, paper is really handy.

Funny, the three reasons you listed are exactly why I prefer an ereader :P

Ever since I got an iPad Pro 12", my requirement for physical copies of technical books has gone down a bit. Often times it's the more convenient option.

I read technical information slower and in shorter blocks of time, so being easy on the eyes like my Kindle isn't a requirement.

I would also love to know an answer to this.

Any print shop / office supply store will print and bind a provided PDF for pennies per page.

Most refuse because it's copyrighted material. Some are also crazy expensive (Staples ~0.10/page)

The first book, for example, is about $21 in paperback from Amazon and I'm having trouble finding a printer around here who would give me those 416 pages for less. Maybe it starts to make sense if you print several at once.

If they allow you to print it, you might want to look at blurb.com: http://www.blurb.com/pricing#/tab/trade-books

Looks like 450 pages, trade, 8x11 inces will run you about 20 USD with cheapest print/shipping combination (possibly with some added tax on top). (16 for printing, 4 for shipping - and this is for a single book - I assume shipping /book will be less if you order more than one book).

I haven't used them, but they were mentioned here a while back.

A quick google search turns up:

http://www.thebookpatch.com/#calculator (looks more expensive for single print runs) and of course good old: http://www.lulu.com/create/books (Appears to be somewhat cheaper).

If you print double sided on a large laser printer, you can print in black and white for about 3 cents per sheet (two pages á ~1 cent, one sheet of paper for about 1 cent). That runs you 6 dollars. A for binding you can use thermal binding for about 50 cents per piece.

So by pure material cost it can be done for 7 dollars (less if you have volume). But of course only if you have access to the equipment, nobody is selling it that cheap.

Legal: No. These are copyrighted works after all.

That said, If you have a laser printer it is probably cheapest to print it yourself. Buy paper that already has the three holes in it for the binder.

Still probably near the price of buying the actual books.

Edit: And if you still want to have there be a bit of a charity tie-in, the Amazon smiles program smile.amazon.com has a lot of charitable organizations to choose from.

Print at home from a laser printer with generic toner...or even better toner that you fill up yourself.

150 pages of binding at a Office Depot is $6 max if you already have the pages.

RE AmazonSmile: Be sure that the organization you wish to support is aware of the program and actually registered with Amazon to receive the funds.

The list of charities that Amazon shows are from GuideStar USA which has compiled the information from the IRS, but this includes organizations which may not have registered and thus may never receive the donations.

See the section "Charitable Organizations that Do Not Register" here: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/pd/ref=smi_se_saas_lpd_spd

How do you know if your chosen organization is registered? Is there a list somewhere?

Good question!

The best way appears to be to pretend you want to register that organization on Amazon's Org Central site[0] which shows which already registered. (An example search for Child's Play[1].)

As a shopper I do not believe Amazon makes this abundantly clear when you're selecting an organization. One thing to look for is the amount of information shown about the organization, specifically the incorporation year, as those that register have to fill out a profile.

According to the FAQ if a shopper selects an organization that is not registered and makes an eligible purchase they will track the donation. If the organization registers they'll get the donation, but if they have not after 2 years then Amazon will contact the shopper and give them 30 days to select a new charity. (I'm not sure if this then resets the 2 year clock or not.) If the shopper does not select a new organization then Amazon reallocates the donation across the registered organizations.

In any case the only way to be 100% sure is to inquire with the organization.

[0]: https://org.amazon.com/

[1]: https://org.amazon.com/npo/search?q=Child%27s%20Play&p=1

> Legal: No. These are copyrighted works after all.

I don't believe that is so clear cut. I think getting a ebook printed can be considered "format-shifting", which while somewhat gray area, leans towards the legal side.

I'm not sure if these books come with some additional licensing constraints that would trample fair-use format shifting, but based simply on copyright getting them printed might not be illegal.

IANAL etc.

Agreed, "grey area" and "might not be illegal".

The reality is, if you are not printing a lot of copies and selling them, you are probably OK.

> Legal: No. These are copyrighted works after all.

At least in Germany, Austria and Switzerland it is completely legal (under some restrictions) if you do it for yourself. Here is the German Wikipedia article on this topic:

> https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Privatkopie&oldid...

lulu.com is a great place to cheaply print books and it only takes about a week. I am not a lawyer and have no idea about its legal applicability, but one just uploads a PDF.

This is exactly what I'm looking for, thank you.

I've used Lulu (years ago) and they do a great job. Not as cheap as a paperback of the same size, but for a one-off (or small number) they're pretty good.

I thought the paper felt a bit cheap and looked somewhat greyish. Although it might depend on the options you select.

But as far as the price goes, they're not expensive but for instance a 126 page book published there was $15.23 (ex. shipping) and you might want to check if the regularly available paperback is not cheaper than that.

It's absolutely great if you made something (wrote a book, or I dunno put your favourite sourcecode to PDF, whatever) with a load of pages and want to own it as a real paperback. There's something extra cool about turning something into an actual physical book :)

You can ask at a local copy/print shop, they often have the material and tools to turn a stack of paper into a binder or other book-like thing. They probably also have a good deal on printing a large number of pages :)

If you ask, some will even accept PDFs to print for you, so you can come back at a later time to pick up the finished binder/booklets.

Not sure if that's strictly legal, but many copy shops won't care and frankly, since you got the PDFs legally I don't really see the problem--in a pragmatic sense that is, going by copyright law, maybe. In some places you do have the right to transfer (copy) copyrighted stuff you have a license for (which is the case here) to another medium. But then you're not allowed to sell or give away that copy (not that anyone will check this ever, but it does make sense to have that as a rule).

I use 2FA on Humble Bundle. In order to log in, I have to solve several captchas. I then have to solve more to buy stuff.

All in all I have to solve the captcha 5 times or so, each time involves marking multiple images.

What sense does this make?

Either they trust the captchas (then they only need one), or they don't (then they should remove them). I've complained about this to them in the past but they haven't changed it.

You need a captcha to log in so that it's hard to make multiple fake accounts. You need captchas to buy stuff because otherwise one could make all accounts manually and then use them to quickly buy products to spend some bank account before it's banned.

I think each smallish site would benefit from designing their own captchas because that way the effort to solve for machines would be harder than solving the Google captchas. The effort to solve for humans would be a lot lower. This is perhaps one of the few areas where rolling your own security solution is beneficial by virtue of it being different.

I think perhaps you underestimate how hard it is to make a good captcha, that is one that is hard to solve programatically but not too hard to solve for a real person (this second part is often overlooked as easy). I suspect you'll find a lot of the prior techniques work well when applied to someone's hand-rolled version, given that coming up with something unique enough to not have prior work put into solving it (and have enough variation to make learning the entire data-set infeasible) is likely much harder than you think.

I don't know.. It seems stupid easy to me. Try something like "Type the third and fifth letters of the word elephant into the box below" with instagram filter applied. A bunch of variations for the first part like "the following word" and "the word in parenthesis".

Basically, I can't think of a way to come up with something ez that defeats it. You would have to train a neural net specifically on these images because normally neural nets are bad at instagram filter removal unless trained on it. Plus you can slow down/ban/mess with requests based on cookies.

There are basically infinite solutions. Would take a couple of days to implement and would be really fun. I guarantee you: if your site gets maybe 30k visitors a week, nobody would bother spending a month cracking your captcha when there are much easier targets out there.

Finally, you can make it super annoying to actually find where the image is by converting to svg and messing with html structure/compose image in JS. Now they're going to be forced to run a headless browser, take screenshots of the captcha page and finding the image within the page.

If they take the pay-per-captcha approach, I don't think anti-captcha and the like would make it too ez. Still days of work to set up something really brittle.

> Try something like "Type the third and fifth letters of the word elephant into the box below" with instagram filter applied.

That was a common captcha technique a decade ago. It didn't last.

> Basically, I can't think of a way to come up with something ez that defeats it.

You're mistaking your inexperience with the field and its methods for difficulty in solutions.

> Finally, you can make it super annoying to actually find where the image is by converting to svg and messing with html structure/compose image in JS.

This isn't hard to defeat. SVG is really no harder than PNG or JPEG to deal with, and if you are programatically altering it, it's trivial to figure out the purpose of the JS and re-implement it, and pass in whatever randomized variables change it. Or just use node, and scrape it from the page and run it as delivered.

> Now they're going to be forced to run a headless browser, take screenshots of the captcha page and finding the image within the page.

That's trivial. Far more trivial now than it was in the past, actually. There's plenty of systems around to run headless browsers. Some are to ease testing for developers, some are specifically designed for and marketed to people that want to do things just like this. Worst case, you use electron and make your own browser to do it.

I don't think this is such a good idea. First of all, designing a catch system that isn't terrible is a lot of work -- it doesn't really make sense for most dev teams to take it on when there are so many pre-built solutions out there. Second, dealing with proprietary captcha systems isn't actually that hard -- you can throw pretty much anything at anti-captcha.com.

Are you using an IP possibly in use by other people? As I'm seeing zero logging in. As to why multiple, they're to prevent bots. Random clicking succeeds some percent of the time, several decreases that percentage.

I think Google is doing that "mark all cars/street stigns/etc" style of captcha and using the data for ML training and stuff it asks juust a little too many it comes across as them using the captcha a little too eagerly to collect data.

Hey there, could you send me an email at jeff@humble.com? Sounds like there might be something weird going on.

Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" by itself justifies the $15 bundle, IMHO. This is a great deal.

Mandatory: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_cult_of_s...

But in the introduction to Bruce Schneier's book, Practical Cryptography, he himself says that the world is filled with broken systems built from his earlier book. In fact, he wrote Practical Cryptography in hopes of rectifying the problem.

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2011/11/07/in-defen...

As someone learning crypto (and slowly joining the Cult of Schneier), this is a valuable caution. Thank you!

Applied Cryptography is outdated and made obsolete by Schneier's more recent, Cryptography Engineering. You should just read that instead.

For more information, 'tptacek explains this more succinctly that I could: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2013/07/22/applied-practical-cry...

Security Engineering is free on the author's website :) http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html

Shhh, plenty of humble books are easily found, but they do good work and provide quality content.

I find this ironic this offering - "Bitcoin payments have been disabled for the Humble Book Bundle"

Great, now there's another collection of books which I'll want to read which I'll feel bad about missing the deal for, then kick myself for never actually reading them in-depth.

I think I've bought 50 books from Humble Bundle (spending about $1/book), but I've only cracked open a few of them.

Also thank you dsacco for the recommendations!

Remember to choose a charity entity for your donation!

ProTip: entities like the FSF, the EFF, Wikimedia and many others can be helped via the humble bundle!!

To download all books at once: https://gist.github.com/graymouser/a33fbb75f94f08af7e36

Improved *nix version further down the thread

Change "MOBI" to "PDF"/"EPUB" if desired

I am interested in learning more about securing web servers (nginx, nodejs). Is there a book in this bundle that could help me? If you know any good books, please recommend me one.

I'm in the same boat as you and have been reading The Web Application Hacker's Handbook that comes in the $1 tier and have been liking it. Bummed I bought it a few weeks ago when it showed up in this.

I don't think you'll find a better group of books for $15, if your goal is to learn about security in general.

Most of the stuff here is general crypto, which is very helpful with respect to just learning about computer security, though not necessarily focused on securing something like nginx specifically. You'll learn a lot more about security in general though, which will make it easier to learn about security specific platforms.

I can't recommend this collection enough. I'd make the purchase, then dive into a couple and read whatever you find most interesting. I don't believe any will have the top keys of security technology X, Y, or Z. But you'll learn a lot in general, and it will be much easier to read other security how-tos and tutorials on locking down specific platforms.

Read The Tangled Web. It's an excellent book for developers that covers defensive tactics for securing web resources. The beauty is that it approaches the subject with developers in mind, not developers looking to become penetration testers (which is why I wouldn't recommend The Web Application Hacker's Handbook for your use case).

Which chapter(s) of The Tangled Web do you feel would benefit a web server administrator? It is a great book, but it is almost entirely focused on attacking browsers. It's not clear to me what changes someone might make to their nginx configuration (for example) in light of the information provided in the book.

I didn't read that out of The Tangled Web. It did cover attacks, but it was also a solid guide on shoring up defenses for developers.

To circle back to your question - nginx is fairly robust out of the box, but The Tangled Web will cover extra configuration steps. For example - how to securely handle and serve files uploaded by users, including file naming conventions.

Other best practices for configuring things like TLS and CORS will also be covered, which are in the purview of any developer setting up a web server. My interpretation of the book was that it covered attacks that are executed through the browser (especially via user input) insofar as it's instructive for developers to learn how to avoid them.

Try this security checklist: https://github.com/FallibleInc/security-guide-for-developers...

There is not actually much to do with respect to securing web servers. For the most part, you're at the mercy of their code and you really shouldn't try to mess with it or you are probably making things worse.

As far as securely configuring them, that's maybe 2 pages worth of material and should be in their respective manuals. Beyond that, your options are standard host hardening and network segmentation. I actually don't think that is really covered in any of these.

Securing the web application running on those servers, however, is a book worth of material. All of these are too old for any mention of nodejs, but Web Application Hackers Handbook will have some generic web attack coverage.

Ironically the Malware Analysts cookbook epub seems to be infected by a trojan. And the Web application hacker handbook also in epub by another one

My first thought was: "Not surprising for a book on malware, probably triggered by an example in the book".

I uploaded the file to virustotal.com and malwr.com. VirusTotal has reports from several scanners, so this is not just misreporting from a single scanner. malwr.com opens the file in a sandbox and it says that it makes HTTP connections and installs itself for autorun at Windows startup.

The Web Application Hacker's Handbook is reported by my local ClamAV 0.99.2 with current sigs but not by VirusTotal. malwr.com also reports HTTP connections and autorun.

I uploaded several other EPUB files and none of them was reported to show such behaviour.

Strange...

Fantastic, glad to have more reading to prep for defcon!

CEH v9 at 15 USD bundle-level is quite a joke, IMHO that should go to the 1 USD level but anyway as someone said Applied Cryptography might be the selling point here.

Personally speaking the only books valuable in this bundle are "Practical Reverse Engineering: x86, x64, ARM, Windows Kernel, Reversing Tools, and Obfuscation" and "Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms and Source Code in C, 20th Anniversary Edition" the other are either quite outdated, too oversimplified or script-kiddie level stuff.

What do you have against CEH v9?

Not the original commenter, but just skimmed that book - it's really, really shallow.

It seems well written, and covers a lot of ground, but it's literally introductory in the sense of "hey, ianai, let's introduce you to the concepts. Concepts, this is ianai; ianai, these are the concepts, now wave them goodbye and let's move on to the next topic".

Answering the test questions included (indicative of the actual certification questions?) generally requires being aware of all the concepts - it doesn't require understanding how/why they work; it doesn't require being able to apply them; simply knowing that they exist and how they're named.

It might be a good starter book from someone coming in to the domain, since it would list all the key things that you'd need to know and introduce you to most of the terminology, but in order to actually learn any of these things (and IMHO to be able to pass certification related to any one of these things) you'd need to go much more in depth than this book will allow.

Aye, good to know!

http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/ec-council/

"Pay what you want^"

^As long as it's at least $15.

It bothers me that Humble Bundle has so heavily embraced this type of marketing.

The first tier is not $15, it's $1.

and it's only $1 to prevent shills from buying in $0.1 increments and defeating the whole purpose of the service.

If I recall correctly, it's a holdover from the video game bundles they offer. Initially you could just plug in $0.01 and get their bundles for a penny each. They naturally would have trouble because of card processing fees, but they allowed it until shortly after they started giving out steam keys for games. A "security" mechanism that steam has in place is they don't allow users who haven't purchased any games to participate in trading items/playing the steam marketplace. Scammers were using humble bundles as a super cheap way of getting tons of keys they could use on fresh accounts so they could be used to scam items from legitimate steam users.

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