Access Denied: The Complete Guide to Protecting Your Business Online

Author: Cathy Cronkhite, Jack McCullough
List Price: $24.99
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ISBN: 0072133686
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media (10 August, 2001)
Sales Rank: 267,306
Average Customer Rating: 4.91 out of 5

Customer Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5
Key points in plain English
I really enjoyed this book. It was straight forward, to the point and provided some great best practices as solutions to some common security problems. A major problem with security is management. Too often the people making the important decisions do not understand the information that they are given.

As the authors point out, Managers and technical staff speak different languages and that is the key problem here. Managers that read this book will gain a clear understanding of the problems that the IT staff faces, and IT people that read this book will understand the management side and will know how to speak to non-technical staff.

This book is a perfect introduction to security and related business concerns.


Rating: 5 out of 5
Excellent introduction to security, a must read
This book won me over by making the complex simple and presenting security as it relates to the bottom line. As the authors point out, business people and IT professionals each speak a different language and waste a lot of time (and revenue) debating when they both really want the same thing. This is the best non-technical introduction to security I have read to date. It didn't waste my time comparing vendors and products and it made the complexities of security clear enough for me to grasp the threats facing our organization.
The section on risk assessment is as concise and on target as it gets. Why spend $[PRICE]on a box to "fix" all of your problems if the potential damage might be less than half of that? The best practices at the end of the chapters give a good start for you to develop a security plan and make it work. People have been talking about security as a process for years but unfortunately no one told the management.
Although this isn't a technical manual with step-by-step instructions for every firewall and operating system you can think of (hacking exposed) IT personnel will have their eyes opened and start thinking about a lot of things they may have never worried about. The book even touches on preparing for disasters...
including terrorism


Rating: 4 out of 5
Great for beginners
This book is a great starter book on information security! I was wading though my copy grumbling "I know this, this, this...", when it occurred to me that I am not the intended audience.

For some time, one of my friends was asking me for a good book on security for somebody who knows absolutely nothing about it. I gave him "Access Denied" - and now he is hooked. Several weeks has passed by and he is already asking for "Hacking Exposed"...

"Access Denied" covers a wide range of security-related topics. The book is well written, logically organized and have everything to appeal to the beginners in the security field, those curious about modern (if not cutting edge) security topics and those migrating to security from other IT fields.

Anton Chuvakin, Ph.D., GCIA, GCIH is a Senior Security Analyst with a major information security company. His areas of infosec expertise include intrusion detection, UNIX security, forensics, honeypots, etc. In his spare time, he maintains his security portal info-secure.org



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