Hardening Cisco Routers

Intended audiences: network administrators, security advisors/auditors, system architects.This book is, pound for pound, among the best in my technical library. Having almost no previous knowledge in router hardening (although I was aware of the basics of Cisco routers) a few hours with this book enabled me to review the "hardening" plan submitted by a highly paid security consultant, and provide useful comments on improving the proposal. No doubt this book is the beginning, not the end, of my education on this subject. But this fine book got me off to a quick and productive start, which is high praise when compared to what could be said about so many other technical titles. Highly recommended.

This book is concise and well written. It covers most, if not all of the areas involved in locking down Cisco routers. And it does so in clearly defined chapters, making it very easy to navigate as a reference. In addition, each topic is accompanied by clear configuration examples.I also found it very complete. Even covering information which I haven't yet come across in the various NSA guides and Cisco texts on the subject. As someone already mentioned, you'll no longer need to trawl the web and other sources for this info; Thomas Akin and O'Reilly's have done the hard work for you.

Although the content of the book can be found in the Cisco web site, but why bother digging the web site for it?Thomas Akin did a great job by providing all the basics (and more) that we should do to hardened Cisco Routers before putting it in a production network specially those routers providing internet access to users.Danilo Castro DyMCP+I, MCSE, CCNP

This book is nothing short of a goldmine. I have read many infosec books, including plenty of Cisco security books, and this one packs twice as much quality information with twice as many topics in a tenth of the space. This one is cut in dry. The layout is perfect. The topic is stated, followed by the vulnerability and then the fix. A network admin's dream, without all of the filler.

This book is a huge *must* for anyone who works with Cisco routers. I got it because as a network admin I needed a checklist on securing our routers. Showed it to our InfoSec director and he ordered all our routers nationwide to be secured according to the book's checklists!