// Prerequisites
What to read before The Car Hacker's Handbook
If The Car Hacker's Handbook feels too steep at intermediate level, here is what to read first. Lighter books in the same topics that build the prerequisites this one assumes.
01 · 2011
The IDA Pro Book
Chris Eagle's deep manual on IDA Pro, the disassembler that defined a generation of reverse engineering. Useful even with Ghidra in the picture, since most malware-analysis literature still assumes IDA.
Intermediate4/5Chris Eagle02 · 2012
Practical Malware Analysis
Still the gold standard textbook for static and dynamic malware analysis on Windows.
Intermediate5/5Michael Sikorski, Andrew Honig03 · 2003
Hacking the Xbox
Andrew "bunnie" Huang on the original Xbox: hardware modding as the entry path into reverse engineering, plus a frank account of the legal fight that followed.
Intermediate4/5Andrew "bunnie" Huang04 · 2021
Practical IoT Hacking
Five-author guide to IoT pentesting covering hardware probing, radio (BLE / Zigbee / LoRa), embedded firmware, and the protocols that connect cheap devices to vulnerable backends.
Intermediate4/5Fotios Chantzis, Ioannis Stais, Paulino Calderon, Evangelos Deirmentzoglou, Beau Woods05 · 2021
The Hardware Hacking Handbook
Jasper van Woudenberg and Colin O'Flynn (NewAE / ChipWhisperer) on real hardware attacks: bus sniffing, fault injection, side-channel power analysis, and the lab work that turns a black box into a known target.
Advanced5/5Jasper van Woudenberg, Colin O'Flynn06 · 2014
Countdown to Zero Day
Kim Zetter's investigative reconstruction of Stuxnet, the joint US/Israeli operation that physically damaged Iranian uranium-enrichment centrifuges via a worm, and what its discovery revealed about state-level cyber capability.
Beginner5/5Kim Zetter07 · 2011
Kingpin
Kevin Poulsen's reconstruction of Max Butler's career — from white-hat consultant to running CardersMarket, the carding forum that consolidated the early-2000s underground — and the FBI investigation that finally took him down.
Beginner5/5Kevin Poulsen08 · 2019
Sandworm
Long-form journalism on the GRU's hacking operations, the best non-technical book on what state-level cyber actually looks like.
Beginner5/5Andy Greenberg