This article lists reviews of several important releases in recent security issue coverage. Two (the Peter Kim and Kevin Mitnick books) could be said to be continuations of a series and two of them are break-in procedural studies (the ones from Allsopp and SparkFlow), while the last one regarding the Maskirovka program might be of somewhat temporary interest. But all have significant drawing cards.
Kim and Mitnick are major figures in security technology. Kim's series needs a new volume every few years due to his concern with explaining current code flaw and tool developments, all of which can change rapidly. Mitnick offers a new perspective in that he's described his famous "social engineering" methods before but now describes defensive rather than offensive strategies.
The Allsopp and SparkFlow books are about entrance methods, open source information scouring, low-order as well as noisy probing and so forth. This is what you'd expect from a survey in the particular magazine that carried the article. PTMag concentrates on aggressive tactics.
The Maskirovka book, while perhaps too topical for some, looks to have larger relevance. The specific outbreak of this Russian Federation-generated item is merely the occasion for bringing up matters than promise to return in slightly altered form in the future. For example, the apparent "Cybercaliphate" that took credit for related activity was in reality our old friends at APT28. An event involving the takeover of video-capable billboards and the injecting of political material re: Ukraine and referencing old Eastern-bloc issues is covered. There's the expected mention of US election influence operations, but after the Cambridge Analytica (and other) data mining efforts, I'm guessing that such approaches are now used by basically everybody, and probably with free tools.
This is a good list. PJ says check it out (with apologies to Joe Bob Briggs, from whom I stole that closing line catchphrase).
