// What to read next
What to read after A Bug Hunter's Diary
Where to go after A Bug Hunter's Diary, picked from our catalog. The next step up from intermediate level, weighted toward the topics this book covers.
01 · 2024
Windows Security Internals
Forshaw takes apart the Windows security model from the SRM and access tokens up through Kerberos, with live PowerShell you can run against your own machine. The most authoritative single source on how Windows actually decides who can do what.
Advanced5/5James Forshaw02 · 2017
Attacking Network Protocols
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.
Advanced5/5James Forshaw03 · 2006
The Art of Software Security Assessment
The 1200-page reference on auditing C/C++ codebases for security: parsing complex memory and integer interactions, language pitfalls, and how vulnerabilities arise from interactions between layers.
Advanced5/5Mark Dowd, John McDonald, Justin Schuh04 · 2024
Evading EDR
A component-by-component teardown of how modern EDR sensors actually collect telemetry, and where each data source can be starved, blinded, or bypassed.
Advanced4/5Matt Hand05 · 2007
The Shellcoder's Handbook
A foundational text on memory-corruption exploitation across Linux, Windows, Solaris and embedded targets. Pre-modern-mitigations in spirit but still the canonical introduction to the techniques the modern toolchain is built to defeat.
Advanced4/5Chris Anley, John Heasman, Felix Lindner, Gerardo Richarte06 · 2017
Advanced Penetration Testing
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.
Advanced3/5Wil Allsopp07 · 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 Erickson08 · 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 Farhi