// Comparison

Cybercriminalité vs Social Engineering: 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

4/52018

Social Engineering

The Science of Human Hacking

Christopher Hadnagy

Christopher Hadnagy's broad procedural reference on social engineering as a discipline — recon, pretexting, elicitation, microexpressions, and the structured engagement model his consultancy operationalized.

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.

Working SE practitioners, awareness-program leads, and people building structured social-engineering engagements who want a single reference for the discipline. Stronger on framework and process than Mitnick; the elicitation and influence chapters draw heavily on Cialdini and Ekman.

Skip this if

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

Readers wanting Mitnick-style war stories or modern AI-driven SE tradecraft (deepfake voice clones, LLM-assisted spearphish). Hadnagy's controversial separation from DEF CON in 2022 is also worth being aware of as context for the author rather than the book.

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.

SE is a structured engagement, not a stunt; the book operationalizes the kill chain in a way most practitioners can adapt directly.
Microexpression and influence material is borrowed but well-applied; the chapters on elicitation are the book's most cited.
The framework (information gathering → pretext → influence → exit) is the book's lasting contribution and the implicit syllabus for most modern SE training.

How they compare

We rate Social Engineering higher (4/5 against 3/5 for Cybercriminalité). For most readers, that means Social Engineering 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 Social Engineering both cover Foundations, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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