Hacking: The Next Generation

Contents of This Book

This book is divided into 10 chapters. Here’s a summary of what we cover:

Chapter 1, Intelligence Gathering: Peering Through the Windows to Your Organization

To successfully execute an attack against any given organization, the attacker must first perform reconnaissance to gather as much intelligence about the organization as possible. In this chapter, we look at traditional attack methods as well as how the new generation of attackers is able to leverage new technologies for information gathering.

Chapter 2, Inside-Out Attacks: The Attacker Is the Insider

Not only does the popular perimeter-based approach to security provide little risk reduction today, but it is in fact contributing to an increased attack surface that criminals are using to launch potentially devastating attacks. The impact of the attacks illustrated in this chapter can be extremely devastating to businesses that approach security with a perimeter mindset where the insiders are generally trusted with information that is confidential and critical to the organization.

Chapter 3, The Way It Works: There Is No Patch

The protocols that support network communication, which are relied upon for the Internet to work, were not specifically designed with security in mind. In this chapter, we study why these protocols are weak and how attackers have and will continue to exploit them.

Chapter 4, Blended Threats: When Applications Exploit Each Other

The amount of software installed on a modern computer system ...