// Comparison

Advanced Penetration Testing vs Pentesting Azure Applications: 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.

Intermediate

3/52018

Pentesting Azure Applications

The Definitive Guide to Testing and Securing Deployments

Matt Burrough

Matt Burrough on attacker behaviour against Azure tenants: identity, storage, VMs, key material handling, and the recon paths that work against real subscriptions.

Read this if

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

Cloud pentesters whose scope includes Azure subscriptions. Burrough covers identity (Entra ID), storage account abuse, VM-level recon, key material handling, and the role-based access patterns that drive real Azure post-exploitation.

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 focused on AWS or GCP, or anyone wanting current Azure tradecraft. The book pre-dates the current AAD-now-Entra-ID rebrand and several major service updates; treat it as foundational, not current.

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.

Azure attack patterns center on identity and roles, not network-level vulnerabilities; the book's framing reflects that.
Storage account misconfigurations remain one of the most common Azure findings; the book's coverage of access-key abuse is still relevant.
Cloud pentest reporting differs meaningfully from network pentest reporting; the book's deliverable templates are useful starting points.

How they compare

Advanced Penetration Testing and Pentesting Azure Applications 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. Pentesting Azure Applications is pitched at intermediate level. Read the easier one first if you're not yet comfortable with the topic.

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

Keep reading

Advanced Penetration Testing

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