// Comparison

Advanced Penetration Testing vs Sécurité informatique - Ethical 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.

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

4/52022

Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking

Apprendre l'attaque pour mieux se défendre

ACISSI

The French-language reference for offensive security: a thick, lab-heavy tour of the attacker's toolkit, maintained across editions by the ACISSI collective under the motto “learn the attack to better defend.”

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 students and aspiring pentesters who want one comprehensive offensive-security manual: reconnaissance, network and web attacks, social engineering, forensics and Metasploit, all hands-on. The closest French equivalent to the English pentest canon.

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.

Advanced practitioners who already work in English and live in PortSwigger Academy and current tooling. The breadth means each topic is an introduction rather than a deep dive, and editions lag the fastest-moving tradecraft.

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.

The single most complete offensive-security book in French — breadth is the selling point, covering recon through forensics in one volume.
Every chapter is exercise-driven; treated as a workbook with a lab VM it teaches well, read passively it teaches little.
Multi-author and re-edited regularly, so quality is uneven chapter to chapter but currency beats most French tech books.

How they compare

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

Advanced Penetration Testing is pitched at advanced level. Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking is pitched at intermediate level. Read the easier one first if you're not yet comfortable with the topic.

Advanced Penetration Testing and Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking 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