Web is inevitably one of the core reasons for the advancements that we experience today almost everywhere. Though the development of Web and its content has been happening for quite a long period of time, the current decade is very significant, especially for JavaScript. When people started writing JavaScript in servers, the language became truly universal. Apart from Web, JavaScript has found …
Back in the spring of 1995, web browsers were very different from present day web browsers. It had been 4 years since the release of World Wide Web (the first internet browser written by Tim Berners-Lee), 2 years since the initial release of Mosaic, and Internet Explorer 1.0 was a few months months away from release. The World Wide Web began to show signs of popularity, and though some of the b…
Microsoft's Azure platform is an exciting offering in the cloud services market space. Designed to compete with Google AppEngine and Amazon Web Services, Azure stresses a familiar development environment (primarily .NET, SQL Server, and Visual Studio) with a rich set of capabilities. In addition to using Windows Azure to host web applications and services, SQL Azure provides a relational datab…
This first chapter covers the basics of setting up and configuring a virtual security lab, which can be used to practice most of the scenarios and exercises addressed throughout this book. Topics addressed in this chapter include the installation of the virtualization software, the installation of various systems in the virtual environment, and the configuration of some of the tools that will b…
Firewalls are a staple of almost every network in the world. The firewall protects nearly every network-based transaction that occurs, and even the end user understands its metaphoric name, meant to imply keeping out the bad stuff. But firewalls have had to change. Whether it’s the growth of networks or the growth of network usage, they have had to move beyond the simple devices that only req…
Clojure is a beautiful, concise language, and its adoption for web applications is ready and about to explode. In Clojure Web Development Essentials, you will learn how to build a Clojure web application from scratch using the Leiningen build tool and the Luminus application template. We’ll start by creating a simple example application in the first few pages of the first chapter, and build o…
After you’ve spent some time in the networking field, you tend to notice that there is rarely a single way to do things, and in many cases, rarely a single, precise definition for terms. After all, often a network engineer’s best answer is “it depends.” Such is the case with enterprise routing, so let’s start off with a definition question: what is an enterprise network? Is it a large…
If you do web development, chances are you've at least heard of CoffeeScript. Though it's less than five years old, this little language has received a lot of attention, and it's getting harder to ignore. Maybe you've already worked with it a little bit, or maybe you're just wondering what the fuss is all about. Good news! CoffeeScript is a delightful language that can help you write better cod…
This book describes the jobs that I and other networking engineers have performed on client networks over the past few years. We are considered network warriors because of the way that we attack networking challenges and solve issues for our clients. Network warriors come from different backgrounds, including service provider routing, security, and the enterprise. They are experts on many diffe…
First of all, welcome to the book! In this chapter, I will give a very high-level overview of JavaScript, such as some of the basic things it can do on the Web both on the client side and on the server side. After that, I will dive into some of the basic examples of JavaScript security issues. Here's what we will learn in this chapter: • The relationship of JavaScript with HTML/CSS • Some b…
The proliferation of the cellular phone has revolutionized the way we connect to the world and communicate with one another. It is the foundation of a mobile lifestyle. Although the evolution of cell phone technology is progressing thanks to hardware manufacturers and platform engineers, the unveiling of its potential is in the hands of application creators. Toward that end, Google and the Open…
In the last 10 years, network programming has stopped being the province of a few specialists and become a core part of every developer’s toolbox. Today, more pro- grams are network aware than aren’t. Besides classic applications like email, web browsers, and Telnet clients, most major applications have some level of networking built in. For example: • Text editors like BBEdit save and o…
The enterprise begins when you carefully put the first two computers together, and complexity grows with every step thereafter. Haphazard IT building practices can easily lead to an enterprise network that is poorly planned or composed of random, one-off projects undertaken as standalone goals. An e-mail consolidation project can unexpectedly derail concurrent licensing projects intended to vas…
The IP version currently used in networks and the Internet is IP version 4 (IPv4). IPv4 was developed in the early ’70s to facilitate communication and information sharing between government researchers and academics in the United States. At the time, the system was closed with a limited number of access points, and consequently the devel‐ opers didn’t envision requirements such as securi…
Financial services companies in the United States are a major industry group, providing five to six million full-time jobs. Banks, insurance companies, and securities firms offer good to excellent employment prospects in many job classifications, including many opportunities in the emerging new economy—the online world of Internet banking, brokerage and e-commerce financial services. Employme…
Albert Gelpi’s American Poetry after Modernism is a study of major poets of the postwar period from Robert Lowell and Adrienne Rich through the Language poets. He argues that what distinguishes American poetry from the British tradition is, paradoxically, the lack of a tradition; as a result, each poet has to ask fundamental questions about the role of the poet and the nature of the medium, h…
One of the most difficult tribulations in the entire realm of computing is security. Computers are tools, and just like any tool, they are designed to be used. Unfortunately, not every usage is proper, and not every computer should be accessed by just anyone. A computer really has no way to classify proper usage against improper usage, or differentiate between a valid user and an unauthorized u…
When asking about Information Security (InfoSec), most people immediately think about stolen credit cards, defaced web sites, and teenage hackers with names like B@D@pple. An InfoSec professional might extend the list to items like firewalls, Vir- tual Private Networks (VPN)s, penetration testing, and risk analysis. What is almost never listed is router security—network security, yes, but nev…
We have sometimes joked that there is no good reason to collect new data, given the wealth of existing data sets that can be used to answer important research questions. These existing resources are often longitudinal and usually have sample sizes that are larger than most samples typically found in psychological research. Unfortunately, our enthusiasm for the analysis of secondary data sets su…
AT RECX we’ve been involved in the world of IT Security for more than a decade. We were involved in some of the fi rst penetration tests performed in the UK, where large organizations and government departments allowed ethical hackers into their networks to determine the risk they faced from what are now known as cyber attacks. As web applications rose in popularity around the turn of the ce…