Special OPs: Host and Network Security for Microsoft, Unix, and Oracle, by Erik Pace Birkholz, published by Syngress in 2003, was one of the more technically ambitious security books of its era. Rather than covering a single platform or attack surface, it addressed the security of the three technology stacks that formed the foundation of most enterprise computing at the time — Microsoft Windows, Unix-based systems, and Oracle databases — within a unified framework that treated host and network security as parts of the same problem. Stuart McClure's foreword to this volume reflects his position as one of the architects of modern practitioner security education.
The Hacking Exposed methodology that Stuart co-created had established the template for this kind of book: systematic coverage of attack techniques organized by target, with specific countermeasures for each vulnerability class. Special OPs extended that approach to a multi-platform environment, recognizing that real enterprise security teams did not have the luxury of specializing in a single operating system or application stack. They had to understand the attack surface across all three, and the interactions between them.
Stuart's foreword drew on his experience at Foundstone, the security consulting firm he co-founded, where the practical challenges of securing heterogeneous enterprise environments were a daily reality. The book's cross-platform approach reflected what enterprise security actually looked like in practice: Windows domain controllers running Active Directory alongside Unix application servers and Oracle database backends, each with distinct vulnerability profiles and each capable of providing an attacker with lateral movement opportunities into the others.
Special OPs remains a significant artifact of early 2000s enterprise security practice, representing both the depth of knowledge that had accumulated in the practitioner community by that point and the growing sophistication of the security book market that Hacking Exposed had helped create. Stuart's foreword positioned it as a worthy contribution to that tradition — technically serious, practically oriented, and organized around the specific knowledge gaps that enterprise security teams most needed to fill.