Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

A Mini-Review of "The Practice of Network Security Monitoring"

NSM book coverRecently the kind folks at No Starch Press sent me a review copy of Rich Bejtlich’s newest book The Practice of Network Security Monitoring and I can’t recommend it enough. It is well worth reading from a theory perspective, but where it really shines is digging into the nuts and bolts of building an NSM program from the ground up. He has essentially built a full end to end tutorial on a broad variety of tools (especially Open Source ones) that will help with every aspect of the program, from collection to analysis to reporting.

As someone who used to own security monitoring and incident response for various organizations, the book was a great refresher on the why and wherefores of building an NSM program and it was really interesting to see how much the tools have evolved over the last 10 years or so since I was in the trenches with the bits and bytes. This is a great resource though regardless of your level of experience and will be a great reference work for years to come. Go read it…