// Comparison
Advanced Penetration Testing vs Hacking: Which Should You Read?
Two cybersecurity books on Offensive, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.
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.
Un labo virtuel pour auditer et mettre en place des contre-mesures
Franck Ebel, Jérôme Hennecart
A hands-on French guide to building a virtual lab (Proxmox) and using it to audit application, web and system flaws — then implement countermeasures.
Read this if
Skip this if
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.
- A practical French guide to building your own vulnerability lab and auditing it end to end.
- Covers application, web and system flaws with the matching countermeasures — attack and defence together.
- From 2013: the method holds, but expect to modernise the specific tools and lab stack.
How they compare
Advanced Penetration Testing and Hacking are both rated 3/5 in our catalog. Pick by topic preference and reading style rather than by rating.
Advanced Penetration Testing is pitched at advanced level. Hacking is pitched at intermediate level. Read the easier one first if you're not yet comfortable with the topic.
Advanced Penetration Testing and Hacking both cover Offensive, Pentesting, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.