From start to finish, this book has taken a year of effort and has been built upon the death of two keyboards, a laptop, and various other hardware components. It also involved a tremendous amount of bandwidth and many late nights trying to get a tool to do exactly what it’s supposed to when the technology involved is conspiring to make things difficult.

All joking aside, no effort of this magnitude can be accomplished in a vacuum and I am very grateful to a number of people for making this possible. First and foremost to my family for putting up with me while I’ve been working on this. My wife Christina and my son Austin are two of the most understanding people in the world and have immeasurable patience when it comes to putting up with me and my passion for technology and teaching. Christina and Austin, thank you for helping me make this a reality. The biggest sacrifice made to get this book done has been your time with me and I appreciate you both being willing to make that sacrifice so that this book could be written.

Thank you also to Matt Cater, Rachel Roumeliotis, and Angelina Ward with Syngress for giving me the opportunity to do this project and providing help, advice, feedback, and support throughout the entire process. This wouldn’t be possible without publishers like Syngress who allow us technical authors the chance to get our words on paper and out to the world. I have been contributing to Syngress books since 2001 and the experiences I’ve had doing this over the last decade have always been outstanding.

At its foundation, this book is about open source tools. A huge thank you has to go out to the open source community and the security researchers who contribute their knowledge and time to that community. In the distant past, security professionals held their secrets close to the chest and didn’t share because they were afraid that they’d lose their technical edge if they disseminated their knowledge. Fortunately, as a community we’ve learned that sharing doesn’t diminish us, but instead gives the opportunity for others to enhance what we’ve done and improve on our work. So to everyone in the open source community, thank you. This book wouldn’t exist without you. The same applies to anyone who freely shares their knowledge and helps people to learn through their blog posts, newsgroup responses, and articles. The technical world is a better place because of you.

In this third edition, I feel like I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. All of the material in this book is based off of the ideas from those who came before me in the prior two editions. To those authors and editors, I thank you for laying the foundation for this edition and providing the groundwork for me to enhance with the technological improvements and changes which have occurred over the years. A thank you also to Neil Fryer for all of his efforts doing the technical editing of my work.

I owe individual thank you to Paul Hand (rAwjAw), Dave Kennedy (ReL1K), Dan Martell, and Kevin Riggins for your help with technical areas and examples used in this book. You guys really helped me out even if you didn’t know it at the time. Thank you also to Scott Bilyeu who has been the greatest sounding board and was never afraid to tell me that something didn’t make sense. You may not recognize it, but you have been instrumental in helping me get this done and motivating me to keep pushing on. Drinks are on me, bro.

With all the people I’ve been in contact with and talked to about this book over the last year, I know I’ve missed some in this acknowledgment. I apologize if I missed you and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all for the support that you have provided.