// Comparison

Cybercriminalité vs Reversing: Which Should You Read?

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

Intermediate

3/52023

Cybercriminalité

Comprendre, prévenir, réagir

Solange Ghernaouti

Solange Ghernaouti's structured treatment of cybercrime — how it works, how to prevent it, how to respond — spanning technical, legal and organisational angles.

Intermediate

4/52005

Reversing

Secrets of Reverse Engineering

Eldad Eilam

The book that taught a generation how software actually looks once you strip away the source. Still the clearest on-ramp to thinking in assembly, even with dated tools.

Read this if

Students (law, management, engineering), managers and investigators who want a structured, up-to-date overview of cybercrime across technical, legal and human dimensions.

People who want to genuinely understand reverse engineering from first principles rather than just running a disassembler and hoping. Self-taught practitioners filling in the gaps under their tooling.

Skip this if

Practitioners wanting forensic or offensive technique; like Ghernaouti's other work, it's a structured survey, not a hands-on manual.

Anyone who wants a modern, hands-on lab course. Skip this if you expect Ghidra walkthroughs or current malware samples; the toolchain here is OllyDbg and IDA-era and the OS examples are Windows XP.

Key takeaways

A 2023 structured survey of cybercrime spanning technique, law and prevention — broad rather than deep.
Strong on the legal and organisational response that purely technical books skip.
A natural companion to Ghernaouti's Cybersécurité, focused on the criminal dimension.

Reverse engineering is a disciplined reading skill, not magic; the fundamentals of how compilers, stacks, and calling conventions work outlast any tool.
The most durable part of the book is the bridge from high-level constructs to their assembly fingerprints, which you will recognize for the rest of your career.
The Windows-internals, copy-protection, and anti-reversing material is a snapshot of 2005 and should be treated as historical context, not current practice.

How they compare

We rate Reversing higher (4/5 against 3/5 for Cybercriminalité). For most readers, that means Reversing is the primary pick and Cybercriminalité is a useful follow-up.

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

Cybercriminalité and Reversing both cover Foundations, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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