// Comparison

Attacking Network Protocols vs Evading EDR: 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

5/52017

A Hacker's Guide to Capture, Analysis, and Exploitation

James Forshaw

James Forshaw, Project Zero veteran, on how to capture, parse, and break protocols from the wire up to the application layer, with a strong focus on building reusable analysis tooling.

Advanced

4/52024

Evading EDR

The Definitive Guide to Defeating Endpoint Detection Systems

Matt Hand

A component-by-component teardown of how modern EDR sensors actually collect telemetry, and where each data source can be starved, blinded, or bypassed.

Read this if

Anyone who needs to understand traffic, not just see it. Forshaw is the rare Project Zero veteran who can also teach; the book turns network protocol analysis into a learnable craft.

Red teamers and detection engineers who want to reason about EDR from the sensor up rather than copy-pasting the bypass of the week.

Skip this if

Beginners who haven't yet handled a pcap, or readers who only want HTTP/web. The book covers Layer 2 through application-level RPC, and the value compounds the deeper you go.

Anyone wanting a turnkey list of working bypasses. Skip this if you don't run Windows or won't sit through the internals.

Key takeaways

Capturing, parsing, and replaying traffic is one workflow, not three, and Forshaw's tooling-first framing makes that explicit.
Custom-protocol auditing (the part security curricula skip) is the part of the book that pays back hardest, especially for embedded, OT, and proprietary stacks.
The "build your own network analysis tool" chapters teach more about how protocols actually work than any number of Wireshark lessons.

EDR is a collection of telemetry sources, not a monolith; evasion means knowing which source sees what.
Most durable bypasses attack the sensor's data collection, not its detection logic.
Vendor-agnostic understanding outlives any specific bypass, which vendors patch fast.

How they compare

We rate Attacking Network Protocols higher (5/5 against 4/5 for Evading EDR). For most readers, that means Attacking Network Protocols is the primary pick and Evading EDR is a useful follow-up.

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

Attacking Network Protocols and Evading EDR both cover Offensive, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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Attacking Network Protocols

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