// 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 · 2021
How to Hack Like a Ghost
A narrated, real-time breach of a fictional data-driven political consulting firm's AWS and Kubernetes environment, written by a working penetration tester who presents at Black Hat and DEF CON.
Intermediate4/5Sparc Flow03 · 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 Forshaw04 · 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 Schuh05 · 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 Hand06 · 2026
Hacking et Cyberdéfense
Two working pentesters who also teach the material walk through the full Active Directory kill chain, offense and defense both, in an expert-level French-language audit manual.
Advanced4/5Jacques Beirnaert-Huvelle, Guillaume Morelle07 · 2026
Practical AI Security
The founder of an AI-security firm, with a PhD in adversarial machine learning, walks from how models fail to how they're exploited to how they're defended and audited, with over 30 hands-on Python demos.
Advanced4/5Harriet Farlow08 · 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 Richarte