The book is a practical guide where every topic is covered completely and succinctly. It does not waste your time with fluff and focuses on cutting edge issues related to Web 2.0 security. This book is not meant to be the end-all for web security. As the title states, it is focused on Web 2.0. If you are an experienced security professional and are looking for a book which will get you up to speed on Web 2.0 security, this is the book for you.

Thanks to McGraw-Hill for my review copy.

Based on my review criteria this book should have easily been a 4 or 5 star book, but I gave it 3 stars for its major flaw. Its major flaw is that it only talks about iSec partner's SecurityQA Toolbar as a tool for testing for the different types of web application vulnerabilities. Only discussing one closed source, for pay tool, that only runs on Windows is really disappointing from a security professional standpoint. I really expected a good snapshot in time on the DIFFERENT tools and techniques for doing web 2.0 auditing. There are tons of "for-pay" and more importantly FREE web application scanners and tools that look for the same vulnerabilities discussed in the book and the fact that they don't mention any other tools or methods is very disappointing.

Now that the above is out of the way...lets get on with the likes and dislikes.

Likes:
-The analysis of the samy worm is excellent. They break the code apart and really analyze what's going on and why it worked at the time.
-The chapter on ActiveX security is excellent. It covers a lot of ground on why ActiveX controls are bad, how to fuzz them and how to defend against them.
-The whole first part of the book on Web 1.0 vulnerabilities is well written, I had just finished XSS attacks and having that background helped a lot with the relevant chapters in HE Web 2.0.

Dislikes:
-The book is short, about 246 pages, that's probably too short for the price for a security book.
-A good chunk of the chapters cover over and over installing and using their SecurityQA Toolbar, I only need it once, if that.
-I think the book stops a bit short of actually exploiting Web 2.0 vulnerabilities. It talks a lot about identifying which 2.0 framework an application was built with and identifying different methods in that application, if debug functionality is enabled, and finding hidden URLs but how I exploit SQL injection issues or XPATH injection or LDAP injection issues IN web 2.0 applications is missing. That was the core problem with web 1.0, its still a valid and dangerous entry point for web 2.0 and should have been covered. Hacking Exposed is generally about exploiting vulnerabilities and not stopping at identifying them which is where the book seems to have stopped.

Overall the authors are obviously very knowledgeable about the subject. One of the other reviewers mentioned that it goes from technically very easy to very difficult even within chapters and I think this is true. The code sample for the examples they give are great and their explanations of web 1.0 and the web 2.0 threats is very well written with good examples. Like I said, had it not been for their fixation with their own tool as the only option we have for web 1.0 and 2.0 testing this would have easily been a 4 star book. For those a bit more interested in web 2.0 I would recommend checking out Shreeraj Shah's Web 2.0 Security and Hacking Web Services books and his website which has free web 2.0 auditing tools.

Hacking Exposed Web 2.0: Web 2.0 Security Secrets and Solutions (Hacking Exposed)

The Hacking Exposed Web 2.0 book has proven to be a fairly huge disappointment for me. After some quality technical books in this series, the publisher has released what amounts to a sales tool for the author's software.

The front cover states "Web 2.0 Security Secrets and Solutions" but the inside of the book hasn't really lived up to that hype. Normally, when it comes to books by McGraw Hill with the Hacking Exposed title, I can expect a decent amount of technical detail on the topic at hand. With this book, it was a bit different. Now, before you think I'm blasting this book entirely, I want to make perfectly clear that there is valid information in this book, but in my opinion, it's pretty basic stuff. If you're a beginner in the world of web hacking, then this book might be worthwhile. However, if you've done much web hacking at all, I think you'll be discouraged at the basic nature of the information included.

The sales pitch starts right in Chapter 1 as the iSec Partners push their Security QA toolbar for web assessments. If you visit their website, they have two separate sections that contain potential software you can download and use. The Products section will allow you to download the trial version of this toolbar, but you have to talk to a sales person to get pricing on the software. But a good deal of the content they discuss in the book is based on this tool.

Now, with that said, there are good points for the book as well. For example, McGraw-Hill sticks to the tried and true format formula that provides readers with an overall Risk Rating for each topic, which is based on the popularity, simplicity, and impact of each vulnerability. Some of the topics in the book do have a better amount of detail on the vulnerability than others. They do a decent job of covering the basic security models in play when a web browser is loaded, even including information on the Flash security models.

All in all, this book isn't awful, but it's certainly not going to give you a lot of information that you couldn't already get online. Because the book is so thin, the actual desk reference value of this book is a bit thin as well. You would do better to purchase a more comprehensive book that you can use as a desk reference later, as you work through your various projects.

Hacking Exposed Web 2.0 is comparable to many of their series, Great information on getting started securing your box, but not without its drawbacks.

I dislike - the thin book, only about 220 useful pages (used to much fatter books). It also often jumps from quite difficult to quite easy often. The difficulty to setting up a test environment, this book would be quite easy for someone who developed all of these environments (from simple HTML and JavaScript to XML and SQL and more) to complete, but it is quite difficult to have these environments readily available to you for testing purposes.

The information is this book is extremely valuable, For a security enthusiast the information gives the reader a great starting point to build on. It has small, short projects (like the rest of the series) that can be completed in reasonable amount of time. It should be noted that this book (once again, like the rest of the series) does require a bit of a commitment, setting up the environment takes time, understanding the text, and doing the proper research will be what makes or breaks the experience for you and what you will gain from it. I would recommend it to anyone with a good understanding of web languages or a strong desire to learn about their security (or lack thereof).

I'm still in the middle of the book, and I definitely will skim thru all the remaining pages (just because I paid for it), but I wouldn't recommend the book to anyone looking for serious and in-depth study on web security - the book just doesn't offer that. What it does is a list of possible attack vectors and sometimes offers "solutions" which can help to fight with the attacks. However, the attacks descriptions are shallow, solutions are very short and non-extensive and many of them go as far as telling a user to install NoScript extension for Firefox (huh? Web 2.0 doesn't work with no JavaScript).

There are also quadrillions of links to a security-related site (won't list it here) which offers a toolbar to checks your sites again the most common security problems. I don't have anything against links to useful tools of course, but THAT amount of links just makes this book look like an advertisement of the fore-mentioned site. Am not even talking about page space wasted to re-iterate "go to ...., install ...., click .... in order to test for ....." which usually take 0.5-1 pages. Users who read that sort of books can somehow figure out how to use a toolbar, I believe.

I'm not by any means a security expert, and this book did introduce me into the topic, but it didn't do anything beyond that. I still need to read some other book on the topic, and that book will probably contain the same info as the Hacking Web 2.0 Exposed (i.e. the very basic info on web expoits), so.. I actually just recommend to pass on this book at all, and look for something which covers the topic in greater depth.