--- title: 'Technical book review: Cybersecurity for Small Networks' categories: - blog abstract: A very short review of a technical book for absolute newcomers. date: 2023-12-14T10:54:48+02:00 draft: false --- {{}} Like every good neckbeard, I have become much more interested in networking in last few years. I have no interest in becoming a network guy, but cybersecurity is on the radar[^llm]. Of course, there is a huge overlap of those two. [^llm]: It seems safe from LLM dread we see in software engineering. Unfortunately, [*Cybersecurity for Small Networks*](https://nostarch.com/cybersecurity-small-networks) doesn't fill my knowledge gap. It's a good book, but it assumes close to zero knowledge. And this is a cool realization: you assume you know nothing and then boom. Suddenly you become a know-it-all. Earned? Nope. But cool nevertheless. Back to the book: it covers creating and securing networks. It gives an overview of doing things across most popular OSes and popular consumer-grade solutions (like pfsense). It is a good **introduction**, but if you already know all the words in [table of contents](https://nostarch.com/download/CyberSecuritySmallNetworks_TOC.pdf), it won't teach you much. Know what a VLAN is? Half of the chapter is boring. Don't use the exact product the author is describing? There goes the rest. There was a moment when I would benefit from reading this book and it was a few years ago. If you are a bit technical and want to secure your network - go ahead. It will help you. But if you want to expand existing knowledge, I'd look somewhere else. Personally, I skimmed most of the book. The last chapter, Monitoring, had a lot of good info as I use an Ubiqity network gear and it gives a lot of it out of the box. I am planning to move to open source alternative (most likely, my next router will run raw OpenBSD), and now I have something to think about. But it's not USD 30-40 worth. Read as PDF on Onyx Boox Note Air 2. book bought as part of a [Hacking Humble Bundle](https://www.humblebundle.com/books/hacking-2023-no-starch-books) Next up: [Hacking APIs](https://nostarch.com/hacking-apis)