Computer Network Security and Cyber Ethics (4th ed.)

This book attempts to teach a combination of internet security and personal morality: “the importance of having a strong moral and ethics background and how this creates a person with character”. Throughout the book there are asides and homilies about the author’s views on “character education”.

However, the formal ethics section is quite short and fairly superficial. Chapter 2 has six pages on morality entirely focussed on Western notions of morality. Chapters 3 and 4 cover ethics and IT but are short and somewhat simplistic, and seem to be aimed at secondary school level. The remaining chapters on infrastructure, network vulnerabilities, enterprise security and protocols all offer fairly standard descriptions of physical and software aspects of computer networking.

However, this title is now in its fourth edition, originally published in 2002. The author has made some efforts to update it, but much of it remains seriously out of date. For example, a scan of the references for Chapter 5 (Cyberspace Infrastructure) shows all four sources are from before 2001. Only one reference for Chapter 6 is current, and part of it warns readers of the vulnerabilities in Windows 2000. The chapter on Enterprise Security speaks of “two recent MMSQL worms in May 2002 […]”. Virtually all the information in Chapter 8 dates from around 2002. The chapter on Social Networks does not even mention Twitter. Chapter 10 (Mobile Security), and Chapter 11 (Security in the CLOUD) are clearly new but based on only internet sources, and they read like a last-minute addition.

Chapter 1 of any book is normally the last to be revised, but while this one purports to be about the changing landscape of cybercrime it sticks to the traditional threats such as hacking and computer viruses, and does not even mention recent events like Edward Snowden and the subsequent surveillance nation debate. It also does not cover the worldwide debates about privacy, government snooping or commercial data harvesting and profiling.

The world of computers and security changes daily, and all texts are likely to be outdated fairly quickly. Unfortunately, this text is already out of date.