// Comparison

Cult of the Dead Cow vs Hackers: Which Should You Read?

Two cybersecurity books on Hacktivism, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.

Beginner

4/52019

Cult of the Dead Cow

How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World

Joseph Menn

Joseph Menn's history of cDc — the Texas-rooted hacking collective that coined 'hacktivism', shipped Back Orifice, and threaded its way through three decades of the security industry's coming-of-age.

Beginner

4/52013

Hackers

Au cœur de la résistance numérique

Amaelle Guiton

A journalist's investigation into the hacker culture of digital resistance — Anonymous, WikiLeaks, Telecomix, the Chaos Computer Club — and the politics of a free Internet.

Read this if

Anyone who wants to understand the ideological and personal lineage of the modern security industry. Many of the people the book follows — Mudge, Veracode founders, the L0pht — are still load-bearing figures in 2026 policy and research, and the book explains how they got there.

Readers interested in hacker culture, hacktivism and the politics of the net, who want reportage and interviews rather than technique. A cultural and historical complement to the technical shelf.

Skip this if

Readers wanting deep technical detail. Menn is a journalist; the book is the social and political history. The Back Orifice, Hong Kong Blondes, and L0pht-Senate-testimony arcs are the technical anchors.

Anyone seeking technical skills or current events — it's a 2013 cultural investigation, not a security manual, and the movements it covers have since evolved.

Key takeaways

The hacker-to-defender arc that the security industry now runs on was largely socialized inside groups like cDc in the 1990s.
The book's policy thread — that disclosure and ethics were debates, not assumptions — is its most underrated half.
Several still-active companies and government roles trace directly to people who first met on cDc message boards; the genealogy chart is the book's quiet thesis.

A rare French-language deep dive into hacktivist culture, built on first-hand interviews.
Captures a specific moment (the WikiLeaks era) in the politics of the free Internet.
Read it for culture and context, not technique — the human and political side of hacking.

How they compare

Cult of the Dead Cow and Hackers are both rated 4/5 in our catalog. Pick by topic preference and reading style rather than by rating.

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

Cult of the Dead Cow and Hackers both cover Hacktivism, Narrative, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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