Doesn't this book apply to all Unix-like systems?

Since Linux is just another Unix-like system, you may wonder why we didn't create Hacking Unix Exposed. To be honest, many of the issues covered in Hacking Linux Exposed apply to many other Unix-like systems as well.

First, you must ask yourself which Unix-like systems would be likely topics. For free systems, we'd be talking about OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BSD, BSDi. For proprietary systems we have Solaris, HPUX, AIX, Tru64, IRIX, and SCO. (Yes, we know we're leaving out a bunch, we're just covering some of the most common ones.)

So to cover the most popular Unix-like systems, we're talking about a dozen or so operating systems. In our book we wanted to show you both the attacks available to the malicious hacker and also the countermeasures you can implement. Showing the countermeasures for each of these Unix flavors would be unweildy to say the least.

That said, however, the attacks we describe are all valid. The countermeasures we provide are both the commands you would execute and also a description of what they do. It should not be hard for an administrator of a Solaris machine to take the countermeasure we describe and 'translate it' to the appropriate Solaris commands. For example some networking /proc changes in Linux would correspond to ndd commands.

Thus Hacking Linux Exposed has value to both Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.