Inside the Spam Cartel. By Spammer-X; published by Syngress Publishing, www.syngress.com (Web); available from various online retailers linked at www.syngress.com; 432 pages; $49.95.

If Spam Kings can be considered a biography, then Inside the Spam Cartel is the technical manual. Written from the perspective of a spammer, it is a first-person account of the technology used in spamming. The book details not only the technologies used by spammers, but also the techniques and the subversive modi operandi.

From a technical perspective, the book shows how to determine where a spam e-mail originates and how to read e-mail headers to determine a message's path. Inside the Spam Cartel also explains various phishing scams and how they are propagated. Spam is an enormous irritant, but phishing is so nefarious that it has the potential to disrupt a large sector of the economy.

Like a genie from a bottle, spam is out of the can and it will never go away. But organizations needn't resign themselves to being victims. Whereas Spam Kings identifies the enemy, Inside the Spam Cartel helps you fight him.

Reviewer: Ben Rothke, CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional), is a New York City-based senior security consultant with ThruPoint, Inc. He is a member of ASIS International.