// Comparison

Advanced Penetration Testing vs Hacking et Cyberdéfense: Which Should You Read?

Two cybersecurity books on Offensive, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.

Advanced

3/52017

Hacking the World's Most Secure Networks

Wil Allsopp

A red-teamer's tour of getting into high-security targets without Metasploit, leaning on custom C2, social engineering, and tradecraft. Strong ideas, uneven execution.

Advanced

4/52026

Hacking et Cyberdéfense

Auditer son environnement Windows

Jacques Beirnaert-Huvelle, Guillaume Morelle

Two working pentesters who also teach the material walk through the full Active Directory kill chain, offense and defense both, in an expert-level French-language audit manual.

Read this if

Working pentesters who want to move past tool-driven engagements and build their own payloads and C2 against hardened, monitored environments.

French-speaking Windows administrators and security practitioners who already know the basics and want one book covering the whole Active Directory attack lifecycle, enumeration, exploitation, privilege escalation, lateral movement, persistence, and trust-relationship abuse, paired with the Tier-based defenses that actually stop it.

Skip this if

Beginners, and anyone wanting a polished, reproducible lab manual. Skip this if you need code you can copy-paste and run, the listings are illustrative and dated.

Readers who don't read French, or beginners without prior Windows/AD or pentesting fundamentals; the publisher pitches this explicitly as an expert-level text, not an introduction.

Key takeaways

Against mature targets the interesting work is custom tooling and tradecraft, not off-the-shelf frameworks.
A realistic APT-style engagement is a campaign, social engineering, staged payloads, and patient C2, not a single exploit.
Evading EDR and egress controls is a design problem you solve before the engagement, not a flag you toggle during it.

Has readers build a disposable AD lab (GOAD, NetExec-Lab) so every attack chapter is run hands-on instead of read as theory.
Covers the full AD attack lifecycle end to end, from LDAP/Kerberos fundamentals through post-exploitation and trust-relationship abuse.
Pairs the offense with a dedicated defense chapter on Tier architecture, AGDLP, and risk-prevention policy, making it as much an audit manual as an attack manual.

How they compare

We rate Hacking et Cyberdéfense higher (4/5 against 3/5 for Advanced Penetration Testing). For most readers, that means Hacking et Cyberdéfense is the primary pick and Advanced Penetration Testing is a useful follow-up.

Both books target advanced-level readers, so the choice is about topic, not difficulty.

Advanced Penetration Testing and Hacking et Cyberdéfense both cover Offensive, Pentesting, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

Keep reading

Advanced Penetration Testing

→ Alternatives to Advanced Penetration Testing → What to read after Advanced Penetration Testing