Weak Focus

I’ve been recently engrossed in Michael Zalewski’s “Silence on the Wire”. That might be a strange statement for a book with the subheading: “A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks”. Admittedly it’s a subject with less than universal appeal and the text is fairly technical in nature, though Zalewski does an excellent job of making what could be akin to reading a textbook into something more like a friendly conversation among geeks. Still, if you’re not already conversant in the technologies he’s describing and in spite of the author’s best attempts, it’s likely to be a bit too dense to stand as island reading. I found this to be a pleasant surprise since so often books in the area of network and computer security are either starkly clinical and academic, or without much substance. Zalewski manages to straddle that line well, and has in the end produced a piece that gives a firm introduction to a number of fascinating and clever ways that bright folks are or have exploited the somewhat naive assumptions of computer and network design.

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