October 2, 2008

Syngress always surprise me !

Some times while searing Amazon for new pubished books , I see strange or unexpected titles . For me , SYNGRESS has always been a pioneer in publishing strange titles ! This time , They`ve dedicated a complete book to the swiss army knide , NetCat ! I`m waiting to take a look at it ASAP. after that , I`ll update this post about contents and quality of conents. Oh and is really NetCat that complex that it requires five authors to work together for writing it`s dedicated book ?!


[Updated:]
Well , I finished review of this brilliant book !
If you`re new to netcat (Oh if so ,why are you reading this blog?!!) , skip chapter 1 & 2 and go read NetCat`s original manual , then come back for later chapters. the only real useful tip is how to make a backdoor with netcat at end of chapter 2 ! Chapter 3 & 4 are about banner grabbing , service detection and enumeration . I`m just not sure why I read nmap,p0f,amap,etc... very often in these chapters . The title of book says "NetCat..." . Ok nevermind , I guess these are typo and spelling errors!!!
Same typo and spelling errors in chapter 5! In these ~30 pages you`ve to learn what we call nmap tips and tricks . They are cool , but not worth reading 30 pages . all of them could be explained in less than 5 pages ,among their details and describtions. Chapter 6 is trying to show even more tricks , following chapter 5 . The only positive point about this chapter is that it introduce other variants of NetCat , armed with encryption or backdooring capabilities . It could be summed in less than 5 pages too , not 40 pages! Chapter 7 in my opinion is the only usefull pice of this book (for network operators) as it show you how to troubleshoot some of common problems with help of netcat .
After all , I found 70% of this book NOT to be about NetCat . Remaining 30% is not even pure NetCat related and includes lot`s of unnecessary blah blah notes .
That`s it!

3 comments:

  1. Thanks hamid for sharing,
    is there any pdf format of it available?

    http://illshare.wordpress.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes , but this blog is not going to house it nor link to that :)
    Try some p2p , or google foo.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks,
    your post encourage me to read it and writing a review for this book in my blog.
    cheers

    ReplyDelete