In those days, such Unix tools as SSH, Pam, and PGP were not widespread (and not covered in this book much), and instead people were still relying on the r-tools, telnet, and archie. Readers will find this rather nostalgic, but the threats posed by use of these tools is surprisingly relevent. Password sniffing ftp connections is a threat just as it is now, RPC and NFS are still major security threats and so on.

One thing that I felt did detract from this book was the somewhat excessive coverage of the authors own modified tools. I feel that altering the Unix tools to fit their security needs was brilliant, and an inspiration to other network security folks, but nonetheless the book had more detail on this topic than I felt was necessary.

On the other hand, I really enjoyed the coverage of hacker methodology. The "Berferd" chapter was truly a fun thing to read. In this chapter, you read about a real incident involving an infamous hacker at the time as he tries to penetrate the ATandT network, and the back and forth battle between the authors and the hacker. Very compelling.

Other chapters also cover hacker methodology very well too. This I feel is what seperates this book from other books. Its not enough to learn about security, because if you dont understand the "thought process" and the way hackers probe the system, then security wont mean much.