Rating: 
Summary: This guy is the devil, and I am scared of him;
Review: Don't spend your money on junk, goto 2600.com and buy "freedom downtime", if you want to have any idea what your talking when it comes to mitnick or anything about our facist goverments wrecklessness. peace
Rating: 
Summary: Better to read Mitnick's book
Review: I don't get it. Tsutomu Shimomura is supposed to be a top gun security guru, yet he gets hacked by Mitnick. What does that tell you?John Markoff does not understand computer security. He makes Mitnick into a much worse criminal than he is. This book is all hype.
Rating: 
Summary: A great story by someone who considers himself a great man
Review: I really enjoyed this book, and found it very quick and easy to read. The only thing that kept me from giving it a "10" was the never-ending deluge of trivia about Tsutomu Shimomura's life, and his disdain for everyone he meets. I liked having the technical details included. Far too many books about computer crime include every gory detail of dumpster-diving and skim lightly over what happens on the computer. After all, people reading these books are likely to be computer people! As an author myself, I understand the need to promote yourself. I don't understand the need to pepper the book with the minutia of your day-to-day life, and I'm sure my readers couldn't care less what I eat. I certainly hope that in the future, Shimomura learns to keep his self-promotion on the dust jacket, and to control his obvious contempt for everyone he works with. All in all, I'd recommend this book. It has much better technical information than Jonathan Littman's book about Kevin Mitnick and provides a much different slant on Mitnick. If you're really curious, read both.
Rating:
Summary: Warning; egomaniac who exaggerates.
Review: I've read every book and most articles about Kevin Mitnick. I think this book is grossly exaggerated, but not only that; I felt the authors are so into feeding their own ego that they forgot to worry about writing a good book that people might actually enjoy. One star. borrring. self obsessed. Can't believe I suffered through the pages.
Rating: 
Summary: A Review of the book Takedown
Review: In Takedown, Tsutomu Shimomura tells the story of his pursuit and the eventual capture by Federal agents of Kevin Mitnick, the fugitive hacker whom Shimomura believes attacked his computers on Christmas Day 1994. Shimomura, a computational physicist and highly-regarded computer security expert was lionized in New York Times accounts by high-tech writer John Markoff, who is co-author of the book. The book is written as Shimomura's first-person account of the events surrounding the attack and the ultimate capture of Mitnick in Raleigh, North Carolina on February 15, 1995. Shimomura's account starts with, and often returns to, the chronicle of an awkward and messy personal relationship with Julia Menapace, a programmer, as she struggles to leave mutual friend John Gilmore for Shimomura. Interspersed is the account of Shimomura's discovery and high tech pursuit of a hacker who launches a very sophisticated attack on his home computers. Attacking a renowned security expert at the National Super Computer Center certainly falls into the class "tugging on Superman's cape". The attack is a state-of-the-art assault using "IP spoofing", a technique which renowned experts had theorized, but which had never been observed (or, at least, reported) previously. Incredibly, the attack is launched from toad.com, one of John Gilmore's computers at Toad Hall, his stately San Francisco Victorian home. Even more incredibly, Shimomura and Menapace are present at Toad Hall while the attack takes place, though their interest is not in the many computers in the toad.com domain. Shimomura dismisses any notion that he might have been involved in attacking his own machine, a tack pursued by San Jose Mercury News reporter David Bank. Indeed, the great space given to the Shimomura-Menapace seems to have been offered by way making clear how Shimomura came to be on the very premises from which his own machines were hacked. This is an important point: Shimomura later says that Mitnick had the skills to use, but not actually engineer the attacking software. Shimomura almost certainly does, and the toad.com coincidence is too much to believe without the context of his developing relationship with Menapace. The trail of Shimomura's stolen files (including code that turns a celular telephone into a scanner capable of finding and eavesdropping on any conversation in a given cell site) leads a chase through cyberspace to The Well, a famous San Francisco BBS and Internet provider, and on to Seattle, Denver, San Jose and ultimately to an apartment in Raleigh, North Carolina. Shimomura emerges as a demanding, often intolerant taskmaster who chastizes colleagues, FBI agents and others as he single-mindedly pursues his quarry. The descriptions of the chase, replete with Shimomura's own clever hacks of systems at The Well and Netcom are fine stuff and well-paced. Ultimately Shimomura gets his man and the real fun begins. A central tenet of the Littman book is that Shimomura and Markoff conspired to publicize Kevin Mitnick's hacking to take advantage of rampant Internet hype, the better to profit from lucrative book and movie deals. It has been noted that Markoff, while highly respected, was not overly quick to point out his role in the affair in his Times' dispatches. Markoff was a victim of Mitnick's hacks and had been a longtime acquaintance of Shimomura's. Mitnick has been described as a sad, computer-obsessed loner undeserving of the infamy generated by Markhoff's NYT stories. John Gilmore and others point to Shimomura's own hacking abilities. Did cyber-frontier correspondant Markoff single out the Shimomura/Mitnick affair as writers of an earlier epoch seized upon the OK Corral? Takedown answers these questions with a straightforward "no" while Fugitive Game says "yes". The reader will be left to make up his/her own mind, but this tale is perhaps not through. Takedown, and the events surrounding its creation, stand as an object lesson in the strange new spaces that are beginning to open on a wired planet.
Rating:
Summary: Tsutomu, Don't Quit Your Day Job...
Review: It took me but two days to read this terrible book from cover to cover, and it seemed to me that each page became more of a drag to flip over. Each chapter seemed to focus on the trivial irrelevance of the author's life rather than on the real reason anyone would bother to buy this book - Kevin Mitnick. I mean, who cares about Shimomura's goofy friends and his obsession with skiing and skating (Be ready, readers, because half of the book is filled with it.).
The impression I got from the Shimomura was that he couldn't contain his resentment toward Mitnick, who was able to successfully break into the author's computers both at home and at work with relative ease. Shimomura tries to counter this fact by stating that he doesn't believe that firewalls are efficacious and prefers to augment the potential of his online connection by not installing barriers around it (I suppose computer security gurus can get away with that sort of thing....aaaah, no.).
John Markoff coauthors this book with Shimomura and both do a terrible job of presenting unbiased information about "the pursuit and capture of Kevin Mitnick". Throughout the book, Shimomura insults the incompetents around him: fellow computer security personnel, the feds, even the whole system as we know it. Well, maybe some of his whining was justified throughout the ordeal of trying to pin down Mitnick, but I doubt others involved in the "takedown" were nearly as condescending as Shimomura.
To summarize my thoughts about the book, I feel that that the entire 300+ pages were devoted to the main author's ego massage. He obviously thinks that he is some sort of Internet hero worthy of a medal, while the barrage of professionals who helped this man caputre Mitnick don't even deserve honourable mention. Please don't quit your day job, Tsutomu.
Rating: 
Summary: Recommended, but with reservations
Review: It's a breezy read, which is pretty amazing, given the number of obscure details that Shimomura feels compelled to share, such as his lunch menu. Still, when you team up an experienced author with a brilliant subject matter expert, it shouldn't be a surprise that the result is something which demands attention. The definitive story of Kevin Mitnick has still not been told--this is an interesting story, but it is hardly conclusive. Furthermore, given the author's attitude--he's got an ego a mile wide--it's difficult to accept everything in this book at face value. Certainly, Shimomura and Markoff had every incentive during their journey to work towards creating an exciting story. A critical reader must consider the possibility that they manipulated events in order to increase sales of their expected book. It is certainly possible that this did not happen, but how can you know? A greater understanding of what Mitnick represents is important in developing an ability to think in useful information security ways. He's become such a cultural icon--a criminal genious in the eyes of one side, and a victimized innocent on the other. Neither of these simplistic views is accurate. I believe that Mitnick probably is a genius, but not in technical terms. He's truly one America's great con-men, and his story teaches us a great deal about how gullible normal people can be, and how easy it is for a smooth-talker with selfish motivations to manipulate normal people. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from a study of Mitnick, although the writers of this text provide minimal assistance in helping the reader draw useful conclusions about the story. They are much more concerned with showing how incredibly clever Shimomura is, purportedly tracking Mitnick from ISP to ISP across the Internet, and eventually right to his doorstep with a junior G-man RDF unit. A Mitnick story that I believe is much more balanced is Jonathan Littman's book, "The Fugitive Game : Online With Kevin Mitnick," which is unfortunately out of print. While Littman's personal relationship with Mitnick--Mitnick apparently just likes him--also should be a datapoint in your evaluation of what actually happened, I think he takes care to make any potential bias clear, and to avoid it. Littman raises some interesting questions about Shimomura. I summarize my feelings about the purported Mitnick attack on Shimomura like this: 1) Shimomura makes it widely known that he has software on his Internet server that is of interest to hackers. 2) He leaves an incredibly obvious security hole open on his Unix server that any Unix newbie would have known to plug. 3) He sends the syslog (system logging) data to another host, which just so happens to be REALLY TIGHT. If he's capable of capturing syslog records in such a secure and non-compromisable way, why did he leave r-services running on the server with the source code? We will probably never know if he actually created a honeypot with the intention of entrapping Mitnick and writing a book about it, but what he did was fully consistent with such a plan. Fascinating, huh? I guess you'll need to read the book to make up your own mind, but if that is what really happened, how do you feel about subsidizing it through reading the book? We'll also never know if Mitnick was really the one who hacked into Shimomura's Sun box using a technique that was previously considered theoretical. Somebody did, and Mitnick certainly was aware of it, but I personally don't believe that Mitnick is technically capable of writing such hack code himself, and I'm not sure that he was the one to perform the exploit. The best description I know of this exploit is found in Stephen Northcutt's book, "Network Intrusion Detection." So it is an important story that can help you develop a better understanding of Internet security, and both security experts and non-specialists could benefit from having a realistic view of the significance of Mitnick. For the time being, this is the most detailed book available, and as an autobiographical account of one the participants in Mitnick's takedown, the book will always have a certain historical significance. But be an especially critical reader with this one. Think through the motivations of the authors, and consider the possibility that Mitnick is a genius at social engineering, but only an average technician. If that's the case, then what really did happen? Read Shimomura's account, and make up your own mind.
Rating:
Summary: This books is pure unadulterated garbage!
Review: Kevin Mtnick was not as bad as this guy Tsutomu Shimomura makes him out to be. Tsutomu Shimomura wants everyone to think Mitnick is so bad and dangerous just so he can feel like a hero. My guess all the stuff in this book are over exaggerated to benefitShimomura. I do not recommend this book, but if you are interested in researching this story there are alot of more unbiased books out there just do a google or amazon search you'll find plenty.
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating read for those into computers and security
Review: Most people who dislike this book, do so because the good guys won. Nothing is more irritating than justice to all the script-kiddies who adore Kevin Mitnick.
Mitnick was smart, and arrogant. He had to be. The fact that he hacked and stole files from Shimomura, a man with just as much determination and roughly double the IQ, is absolutely hilarious. If you've ever doubted that justice can prevail, you should read this book.
I can't give it five stars because, let's be honest, Tsutomu Shimomura is better at programming than writing. There are a few throw-away chapters in here. In all, though, the technical side of the cyberchase is very detailed and should be quite fascinating and a quick read for anyone interested in network security. I finished it in about three days.
Rating:
Summary: Great story, patchy delivery
Review: Shimomura was a teen physics prodigy in Physics and Computers and has now ended up as one of the world's leading experts on computer security. He's also a ski-bum so he's not all that bad :-) This book details the story of what happened when the "world's most wanted hacker", Kevin Mitnick, payed an uninvited visit to Shimomura's computer and then taunted him about afterwards. He lived to regret it. Shimomura is a curious mix of characteristics. The arrogance and show-off nature of his character are offset by his very real achievements, some natural goofy charm (especially the relentless California slang) and in the end this reader was left with admiration for his skills, jealousy of his career and a certain sense of relief that I never got into computer-cracking in the first place. Unix fans will delight in the Unearthed Arcana displayed by Shimomura and I suspect one or two victims of computer crime may have scribbled down the odd technical note when reading his descriptions of the cyber-forensic investigation he performed on his violated computer. There is even a certain amount of philosophy which adds depth but is not too pretentious. Shimomura names his computers but makes it clear that that is simply pragmatic, they are not his friends and he prefers people to computers. He also thinks people should not share a room with the moving parts (disk drives, fans etc) and so banishes the boxes to the cupboard and allows only the keyboard and monitor into his presence. As I sit in the white noise hell of my office I sometimes wish my elders and betters felt this way. The story has some amusing twists and turns but is not as satisfying a story as The Cuckoo's Egg. On the other hand it is bang up-to-date and the book is accompanied by it's own web site. I enjoyed the book and it's recommended reading for anyone interested in computer crime.
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