This book is about building a playbook or a concrete set of strategies so your InfoSec team or Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) can be efficient and effective. However, before you can develop a playbook, you need a team to run it and the policy backing to enforce it. If you are reading this book, chances are you are in some way involved with InfoSec and are looking to implement …
For many decades multi-party computation (MPC) had been a predominantly theoretic endeavour in cryptography, but in recent years interest has arisen on the practical side. This has resulted in various implementation improvements and such protocols are becoming more applicable to practical situations. A key part in this transformation from theory to practice is in adapting theoretical protocols …
To understand what cloud computing is and is not, it is important to understand how this model of computing has evolved. As Alvin Toffler notes in his famous book, The Third Wave (Bantam, 1980), civilization has progressed in waves (three of them to date: the first wave was agricultural societies, the second was the industrial age, and the third is the information age). Within each wave, there …
Firewalls have ample recognition as key elements in the field of protecting networks. Even though this is not a new subject, many important concepts and resources that could be helpful to designing a secure network are often overlooked or even ignored. This book is targeted at unveiling the potential of Cisco Firewall functionalities and prod- ucts and how they can be grouped on a structured …
Advertising, an essential component in the marketing of any business, has been around for a long time. The Pompeii penis is positively modern compared to some of the advertising relics archaeologists have unearthed in ancient Arabia, China, Egypt, Greece and Rome. The Egyptians used papyrus to create posters and flyers, while lost-and-found advertising (also on papyrus and often relating t…
Application of depth methods to functional data provides new tools of analysis, in particular an ordering of curves from the center outwards. Two specific depth definitions are band depth and half-region depth (Lo ́pez-Pintado & Romo (2009). Journal of the American Statistical Association, 104, 718–734; Lo ́pez-Pintado & Romo (2011). Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 55, 1679–1695…
Enterprise application development over the decades has been a pendulum swinging back and forth between terminal and mainframe, between client and server. In the 1980s, business logic was largely pushed to the server by "dumb terminals" or "thin clients" which did very little except act as a middleman between the user and the server. Beginning in the 1990s, logic started to swing to the client…
You are responsible for managing your company’s foreign exchange positions. Your boss, or your boss’s boss, has been reading about derivatives losses suffered by other companies, and wants to know if the same thing could happen to his company. That is, he wants to know just how much market risk the company is taking. What do you say? You could start by listing and describing the company’s…
In this chapter, we will cover the major components that almost all alarm systems have in common. By the end of the chapter you will realize that the so-called high tech alarm systems and access control systems are not really as complicated as some would like you to believe. That said, let's get started. Every alarm system in the world does two and only two basic things. • It monitors the wor…
In the social and behavioral sciences, statistics serve two general purposes. First, they can be used to describe what happened in a particular study (descriptive statistics). Second, they can be used to help draw conclu- sions about what those results mean in some broader context (inferential statistics). The main question in inferential statistics is whether a result, finding, or observation …
This is the least fun—but nevertheless critical—part of the book, where we walk through setting up an environ- ment in which to write and test Python. We are going to do a crash course in setting up a Kali Linux virtual machine (VM) and installing a nice IDE so that you have everything you need to develop code. By the end of this chapter, you should be ready to tackle the exer- cises and co…
Microsoft officially announced SQL Server 2008, codenamed Katmai, at the first Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) conference in May 2007. I suppose I had the same reaction as many others — ‘‘Already?’’ SQL Server 2005 had only been released a year and a half earlier, and I started to wonder if it was too soon. I can’t tell you why I thought that. I also knew that it wasn’t unu…
In a relatively short period of time, Android has become the world’s most popular mobile platform. Although originally designed for smartphones, it now powers tablets, TVs, and wearable devices, and will soon even be found in cars. Android is being developed at a breathtaking pace, with an average of two major releases per year. Each new release brings a better UI, performance improvements, a…
Network security is currently becoming one of the main problems for the develop- ment of new technologies and services in telecommunication networks. Hackers are constantly evolving towards new attack techniques and new target tech- nologies at a very high speed [1] [2], thus making the task of building defense mechanisms a hard mission. In this context, many efforts have been done by the rese…
Currently, computer networking has already become ubiquitous, the number of diverse devices is increasing constantly, as are also their capabilities, the range of applications and network-based services is expanding, and user expectations are rapidly evolving. This is the context in which the authors set the scene for this net- work programming book in its introductory chapter. The past decade…
Government intervention is perhaps the most universal institutional change in the development of modern economies. Yet there is considerable debate on the relationship between economic development and the expansion of government. The relationship has been viewed as causal, but both directions have been emphasized. To many, government fosters economic growth. To others, economic growth, because …
APIs are becoming increasingly popular for exposing business functionalities to the rest of the world. According to an infographic published by Layer 7, 86.5% of organizations will have an API program in place in the next five years. Of those, 43.2% already have one. APIs are also the foundation of building communication channels in the Internet of Things (IoT). From motor vehicles to kitchen …