The best form of defense for network abuse teams is to “know your enemy”. You need to get into the mindset of hackers and other network abusers in order to really understand what drives them. Once you have a clearer picture of your attackers, you are in a far better position to protect your ISP from attack. To help you with this process, we’ve put together a comprehensive reading list that explores the psyche of the underground economy and what fuels it.
Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime – from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door By Brian Krebs
Spam Nation is a New York Times bestseller and the winner of the 2015 Prose Award. In this book, an investigative journalist and cybersecurity expert, Brian Krebs, gets into the heads of the masterminds orchestrating some of the biggest spam and hacker operations targeting Americans and their bank accounts.
It blends cutting-edge research with investigative reporting and first-hand interviews to reveal how we unknowingly invite digital criminals into our everyday lives. In this book, Krebs explores the dire lengths people will go to in order to profit from data. Read it for a definitive account of the global spam problem and its threat to consumers everywhere.
Future Crimes: Inside the Digital Underground and the Battle for Our Connected World By Marc Goodman
This book is written by Marc Goodman who has spent a career in law enforcement and technology. He was appointed futurist-in-residence with the FBI and worked as a senior advisor to Interpol. In this book, he takes his readers on a vivid journey that explores some of the most hidden and darkest corners of the Internet.
It reveals how technological advances, which have benefited our world and include implantable medical devices to drones, can all be turned against us. Read it to discover how we need to take back control of our own devices and harness technologies’ tremendous power for the good of humanity before it is too late.
Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker By Kevin Mitnick
Kevin Mitnick was the most elusive hacker in history, famous for hacking into the world’s biggest companies like Motorola, Sun Microsystems, and Pacific Bell. He spent years staying a few steps ahead of the authorities and was labeled “unstoppable”. For Kevin, hacking was not just about technology, it was a game that required guile and cunning in order to access valuable information. Read it to get inside the head of a true visionary who forced the authorities to rethink how they pursued him and companies to reassess how they protected their most sensitive information.
Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War By Fred Kaplan
Dark Territory is written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Fred Kaplan, who probes the inner corridors of the “beyond-top-secret” cyber units in the Pentagon. He tells the secrets of “information warfare” and the officers, policymakers, scientists, and spies who devised this new form of warfare, and who have been playing it and fighting it for decades. Read it to discover the intricacies of our past and what the future holds in store for us all.
Once you have got inside the minds of the forces behind network abuse, it’s important to look forward and plan how to protect your ISP from the escalating risk of cyberattacks. Juniper Research reports that by 2019, cybercrime will cost businesses over $2 trillion. So taking action now is a necessity. One of the ways to do this is by following anti-abuse best practices against botnets, malware, spam, viruses, DoS attacks, and other online exploitation.
Companies like Abusix are all members of The Messaging, Malware and Mobile Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) which come together to work against botnets, malware, spam, viruses, DoS attacks, and other network abuse. Today M3AAWG consists of over 200 members and is the largest global industry association developing cooperative approaches for fighting online abuse.
Abusix’s product AbuseHQ has many of M3AAWG’s best practices built into it and we have helped several M3AAWG members improve the security of their own abuse desks.
If you have any valuable reading you feel will be beneficial in the fight to protect ISPs from network abuse, please let us know.
To find out more about how you can proactively protect your ISP from network abuse, download this free e-book from Abusix.
