// Comparison
Cyberattaques vs Tracers in the Dark: Which Should You Read?
Two cybersecurity books on Cybercrime, compared honestly: who each is for, what each does best, and which to read first.
A clear, journalistic decoding of the cyberattack ecosystem — ransomware gangs, state actors, and the economics and geopolitics behind the headlines — by one of France's best-known cyber experts.
The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency
Andy Greenberg
Andy Greenberg's investigative narrative of how Bitcoin's allegedly-anonymous public ledger became, in the hands of researchers and federal investigators, the most powerful OSINT tool of the last decade.
Read this if
Skip this if
Key takeaways
- The most accessible French overview of the modern threat ecosystem — ransomware, state actors, the underground economy.
- Billois is a working consultant, so the examples are grounded in real incident response, not theory.
- A great gateway book for non-technical decision-makers who need to grasp the stakes.
- Anonymity is a property of the system, not the protocol; Bitcoin's pseudonymity collapses under sufficient analysis and patience.
- The hardest investigations were won at the intersection of on-chain pivots and traditional OSINT (forum posts, reused emails, parcel addresses), not by clever cryptography breaks.
- Greenberg's pacing makes this the best 'real OSINT investigation, end to end' book in print; read it before any blockchain-analysis training.
How they compare
We rate Tracers in the Dark higher (5/5 against 4/5 for Cyberattaques). For most readers, that means Tracers in the Dark is the primary pick and Cyberattaques is a useful follow-up.
Both books target beginner-level readers, so the choice is about topic, not difficulty.
Cyberattaques and Tracers in the Dark both cover Cybercrime, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.