// Prerequisites
What to read before Attacking Network Protocols
If Attacking Network Protocols feels too steep at advanced level, here is what to read first. Lighter books in the same topics that build the prerequisites this one assumes.
01 · 2008
Hacking: The Art of Exploitation
A from-first-principles tour of low-level exploitation that still teaches the mindset two decades later.
Intermediate5/5Jon Erickson02 · 2020
Black Hat Go
Tom Steele, Chris Patten, and Dan Kottmann show how to use Go's networking primitives, concurrency model, and cross-compilation to write offensive tooling that runs almost anywhere.
Intermediate4/5Tom Steele, Chris Patten, Dan Kottmann03 · 2021
Black Hat Python
Justin Seitz and Tim Arnold's hands-on tour of writing offensive tooling in Python: network sniffers, web scrapers, GitHub-based command-and-control, screen capture, keylogging, and Volatility extensions.
Intermediate4/5Justin Seitz, Tim Arnold04 · 2017
Practical Packet Analysis
Chris Sanders' working manual for Wireshark, geared at troubleshooting and incident response rather than abstract protocol theory. Updated for Wireshark 2.x.
Beginner4/5Chris Sanders05 · 2013
The Practice of Network Security Monitoring
Richard Bejtlich's NSM playbook: how to deploy collection sensors, validate that you actually see what you think you see, and build detection workflows around open-source tools.
Intermediate5/5Richard Bejtlich06 · 2011
A Bug Hunter's Diary
Tobias Klein walks through seven real vulnerabilities he found and exploited, in the form of personal lab notes, what he tried, what failed, and what eventually shipped to vendors.
Intermediate4/5Tobias Klein07 · 2024
Black Hat Bash
Nick Aleks and Dolev Farhi on getting offensive work done with the shell: privilege escalation tooling, lateral movement, and pipelining bash with the rest of the toolkit.
Intermediate4/5Nick Aleks, Dolev Farhi08 · 2023
Black Hat GraphQL
Aleks and Farhi on attacking GraphQL specifically: introspection abuse, batching, depth and complexity attacks, auth flaws, and the differences from REST that make GraphQL pentests their own discipline.
Intermediate4/5Nick Aleks, Dolev Farhi