Malware Analyst’s Cookbook and DVD

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Another technical book, this time because my employer lets me buy random technical books as long as I pinky swear to read them and this one sounded interesting and got good reviews. First off, the book is a bit dated given its from 2011 -- there are lots of references to Ubuntu 10.10 for example and they say to avoid Python 3, which has its historical charm. This is unfortunate given the first section of the book talks about setting up honeypots to collect malware to examine, but Dionaea for example had its last commit in 2021. I am left wondering if there are more modern honey pot systems that people use these days. Secondly the book is definitely a cookbook and that's on me for not noticing this about the book before buying it -- its a series of recipes / scripts that do interesting things with malware. That said, it isn't really teaching a cohesive set of skills, its more of a series of stepping stones along the path you might follow. I think that's an unintended piece of important learning -- books with "cookbook" or "recipes" in their title probably aren't very good as an overview of…

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Cisco CyberOps Associate: Official Cert Guide

I don't think I've really reviewed a technical book here before, but I read the thing so I guess I should. This book is the certification guide for a "Cisco CyberOps Associate" certification, which is what they now call the CCNA Security qualification. Its a relatively junior certification, qualifying you to be a level one operator in a Security Operations Centre (SOC). I read this book because I took a Cisco NetAcad course for the associated certification in the second half of 2022 (although it has continued to be a thing I plug away at in 2023). That was mainly motivated by a desire to more about a field that is clearly important, but hasn't been core to my personal career. This book is reasonably well written and readable -- I'd read a chapter in the evening after work and its wasn't a huge chore to churn though. I certainly learned things along the way, even if the certification seems to suffer from a desire to have everyone rote learn a lot of acronyms, which seems like a common ailment in the industry (AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, I'm looking at you). My main critism is of the qualification itself, which…

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On layers

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There's been a lot of talk recently about what we should include in OpenStack and what is out of scope. This is interesting, in that many of us used to believe that we should do ''everything''. I think what's changed is that we're learning that solving all the problems in the world is hard, and that we need to re-focus on our core products. In this post I want to talk through the various "layers" proposals that have been made in the last month or so. Layers don't directly address what we should include in OpenStack or not, but they are a useful mechanism for trying to break up OpenStack into simpler to examine chunks, and I think that makes them useful in their own right. I would address what I believe the scope of the OpenStack project should be, but I feel that it makes this post so long that no one will ever actually read it. Instead, I'll cover that in a later post in this series. For now, let's explore what people are proposing as a layering model for OpenStack. What are layers? Dean Troyer did a good job of describing a layers model for the OpenStack…

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Working on review comments for Chapters 2, 3 and 4 tonight

Michael Carden asks in a comment to my previous post to the book if I had considered making draft chapters available for public comment before printing. To be completely honest it hadn't occurred to me until Michael suggested it, and it does fit well with all the open source stuff I have done over the years. It's a hard call though, because there is already a review team of four or five, and there isn't much spare time in the process because we really want the book published in time for Christmas. This is why I'm going to say no this time to the offer of a more public review, and I'll do my best to take that on board next time when I know more about how long this sort of thing can take (I'm actually only about two days over schedule at the moment, but I really don't want to slip any further). Sorry Michael. Anyways, I'm working on review comments for three chapters tonight, which is one of the things that made me think about this more. I'm really rather surprised about how positive the review comments have been so far given how I feel about the…

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