Incident Response fills a need that's existed in the security book market for some time. The authors — a pair of accomplished incident response experts, not merely researchers — have converted to book form their accumulated wisdom on the question of how to respond to an attack on computer systems. Their expertise is only partly technical; much of what Eugene Schultz and Russell Shumway have written has to do with legal questions and policy decisions. It's a reasonable balance, considering that the state of the art in network intrusion (and defense against it) changes frequently and security administrators are better armed with concepts and strategies than with "click this, type that" instructions. The explicit technical material that does appear here is nicely balanced between Windows and Unix systems, and clearly explains networking details of interest to security people and their managers. The explanation of how a spanning port can make a switch work like a hub for purposes of packet monitoring — nearly entirely prose — is one example of high-quality technical coverage that will remain valuable as operating systems and other network details change over time.

Unlike many books about computers, this one deserves to be read cover to cover. The authors have points to make, and they generally build on their earlier thoughts as they go. Some material in these pages seems somewhat obvious — the advice to dress nicely for a media interview, for example — but it all fits with the authors' goal of showing their readers how to react (in all respects) to security problems when they happen. Read this, be prepared for trouble, and know how to educate others about incident response.