My standard nonfiction book rating is 3 stars but I'm tempted to go higher for this book because I learned to play Sherlock Holmes on the internet. This book taught me the basics of how spammers and scammers operate and where to look for their telltale fingerprints and other clues.It goes beyond the simple consumer warnings and advice but not as far as corporate systems auditing. It assumes you take the usual precautions of antivirus, spyware, and firewall software and takes you into the realm of amateur detective. A hobbyist programmer or power user can understand the concepts and with some knowledge of Unix type commands and scripting languages can follow the explanations in detail.This edition is from Oct 2005 so I'm sure the really clever ploys have become far more sophisticated. To use another dreaded car analogy, this book is not about finding the professional car theft ring but about tracking the joy riding teenager. The author even cautions about taking your investigations to the extreme of interfering with ongoing law enforcement efforts. The internet is an open environment and there are tracks, traces, logs, and other information waiting to be found. You learn how to filter and interpret email and other communication headers, web page directories and source code, server logs and redirects, and other interesting detritus.Being an old mainframe programmer I used to enjoy poring over hexadecimal dumps looking for bugs. Now I can recapture some of that by examining the internet trails. ( )

My standard nonfiction book rating is 3 stars but I'm tempted to go higher for this book because I learned to play Sherlock Holmes on the internet. This book taught me the basics of how spammers and scammers operate and where to look for their telltale fingerprints and other clues.It goes beyond the simple consumer warnings and advice but not as far as corporate systems auditing. It assumes you take the usual precautions of antivirus, spyware, and firewall software and takes you into the realm of amateur detective. A hobbyist programmer or power user can understand the concepts and with some knowledge of Unix type commands and scripting languages can follow the explanations in detail.This edition is from Oct 2005 so I'm sure the really clever ploys have become far more sophisticated. To use another dreaded car analogy, this book is not about finding the professional car theft ring but about tracking the joy riding teenager. The author even cautions about taking your investigations to the extreme of interfering with ongoing law enforcement efforts. The internet is an open environment and there are tracks, traces, logs, and other information waiting to be found. You learn how to filter and interpret email and other communication headers, web page directories and source code, server logs and redirects, and other interesting detritus.Being an old mainframe programmer I used to enjoy poring over hexadecimal dumps looking for bugs. Now I can recapture some of that by examining the internet trails. ( )