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This book explores fundamental principles for securing IT systems and illustrates them with hands-on experiments that may be carried out by the reader using accompanying software. It details different countermeasures and their implementation.

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Chap. 1, Security Principles.- Chap. 2, The Virtual Environment.- Chap. 3, Network Services.- Chap. 4, Authentication and Access Control.- Chap. 5, Logging and Log Analysis.- Chap. 6, Web Application Security.- Chap. 7, Certificates and Public-Key Cryptography.- Chap. 8, Risk Management.- App. A, Using This Book in a Lab Course.- App. B, Report Template.- App. C, Linux Basics and Tools.- App. D, Answers to Questions.- References.- Index.

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"This book is a good way for newcomers to the security field, or those who want an overview of a goodly sampling of security issues, to start understanding both the issues and possible defenses. It is very much a workbook, with numerous in-line problems to work on and a nice set of questions and exercises for each chapter; answers appear in an appendix. Many of the exercises involve using specific software to look at events as they occur. ... It is very readable and well organized, and the questions and exercises are generally very good. It is an excellent introduction to the subject and would make a good upper-level undergraduate text. It would also be quite useful as a self-study text for someone new to the field." (Jeffrey Putnam, ACM Computing Reviews, August 2012)
"My students and I are big fans of this book. I have been using it regularly, since its publication, in the course "Network Security" that I teach in the Master of Science Program "Engineering and Computer Science" at the University of Verona, Italy. The course is structured in a number of theory lectures, covering the main aspects of network security, accompanied by a lab in which I have adopted [this] book. [It] delivers successfully and elegantly what it promises: it complements in an interesting and unique way the theory lectures. It allows students to carry out exercises and experiments on the topics that have been discussed in the lectures and, thanks to the accompanying software, they can choose to do this in the university lab or at home (or both). The assignment project proposed at the end of the book challenges the students in a very proficient way and, indeed, the ratings of the course by students have risen considerably since I adopted the book." (Luca Viganò, Università di Verona, Italy)
"[F]or those looking for an intense but brief and concentrated introduction to some of the fundamentals of information security, to supplement other more comprehensive references, [this] is an excellent book." (Ben Rothke)

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