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Non-Fiction Review: Security Data Visualization

I've just completed reading Greg Conti's well-written work Security Data Visualization: Graphical Techniques for Network Analysis. It's very important to note the subtitle there: "Graphical Techniques for Network Analysis" because, after introducing the topic of visualization in the first couple chapters, the book turns into network analysis full-bore. In general, this seems to be a good, useful book. Specifically, I think that it would be a very good textbook for a network security course, as the text spends a considerable amount of time in the earlier chapters introducing the reader to the basics of networking and network analysis, including providing high-level coverage of port scanning and network assessment with tools such as Nmap, Nessus, and Metasploit.

Following are a few quotes from the introductory chapters that may give you a better sense of the book:

"Ben Shneiderman's information visualization mantra, overview first, zoom and filter, details on demand, concisely describes the traditional elements of an interactive information visualization system." (p14)

There, Conti is setting the groundwork for his shared philosophy on the use and manner of visualization.

"Today, few technologies bridge the gap between human and machine processing. In the future, I envision tools that maximize the pattern-matching and anomaly detection strengths of humans and allow human insights to be communicated to machines for high-speed automated processing." (p26)
This quote is an interesting prediction, and one that I suppose makes sense from the current perspective. However, I find it unlikely that computer processing of visualizations will not at some point advance greatly, to parallel human processing. Of course, that may be centuries for all I know. :)

Breaking from tradition, because of a backlog of non-fiction reading, and because of the ease with which I skimmed through this last work, I'll next be moving on to Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. I've been meaning to read this work for quite some time and, with his win in Iowa, figure now is probably a good time to get it done.

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