// Comparison

Cult of the Dead Cow vs The Art of Intrusion: Which Should You Read?

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

Beginner

4/52019

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

4/52005

The Art of Intrusion

The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders and Deceivers

Kevin Mitnick, William L. Simon

Mitnick and Simon's follow-up to The Art of Deception: third-party stories from working hackers — casino slot exploits, prison-network breaches, post-9/11 intelligence ops — reconstructed and annotated by Mitnick.

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 who liked The Art of Deception and want more case-study breadth, especially around physical-security pivots and improvised tradecraft. Underrated as a source of pretext patterns for awareness training: the casino chapter alone is worth the price.

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 needing current technique. The book is 2005 — Windows XP era — and the technology is incidental to the human stories anyway. Skim if you want; the value lives in the patterns, not the payloads.

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.

Most successful intrusions are not single-vector — they are patient compositions of small advantages, and the book's structure makes that visible.
The 'we got bored and tried it' chapters illustrate why curiosity is operationally distinct from skill, and why both matter.
Insider stories like the prison and casino chapters are the closest most readers will get to seeing how a long-running campaign actually feels from the inside.

How they compare

Cult of the Dead Cow and The Art of Intrusion 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 The Art of Intrusion both cover History, Narrative, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

Keep reading

Cult of the Dead Cow

→ Alternatives to Cult of the Dead Cow → What to read after Cult of the Dead Cow