// Comparison

Cybercriminalité vs Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercises: Which Should You Read?

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

Intermediate

3/52010

Droit pénal appliqué

Myriam Quéméner, Yves Charpenel

A practitioner's treatment of cybercrime law — offences, procedure, and the application of criminal law to digital crime — by a French magistrate specialised in the field.

Intermediate

4/52024

Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercises

From Planning to Execution

Robert Lelewski, John Hollenberger

Two veteran security consultants walk through planning, running, and following up on tabletop exercises, from technical incident-response drills to executive-level and cross-functional scenarios.

Read this if

Lawyers, magistrates, compliance teams and investigators who need the legal framework around cybercrime: what's punishable, how procedure works, how the law is applied.

Incident responders, security managers, and anyone tasked with improving an organization's readiness who needs to actually run a tabletop, not just read about why they matter. Includes ready-to-adapt scenarios, injects, and storyboards for technical, executive, and cross-functional exercises.

Skip this if

Technical readers wanting attacks or defence; this is a French-law legal text, and parts of any 2010 legal book are superseded by newer legislation.

Readers looking for incident-response technique itself (forensics, containment, eradication); this book is about rehearsing and testing a response plan, not executing one. Pair with Incident Response and Computer Forensics or Intelligence-Driven Incident Response for that side.

Key takeaways

A specialist legal reference on French cybercrime law, by a magistrate who works the field.
Covers the offences, procedure and application of criminal law to digital crime.
Law evolves: read for the framework and reasoning, but verify specifics against current legislation.

Splits cleanly into process (how to plan, facilitate, and evaluate an exercise) and content (ready-made scenarios across technical, executive, and cross-functional levels).
Facilitation technique gets real attention — keeping participants engaged is treated as a skill, not an afterthought.
Evaluation and follow-up are covered as seriously as the exercise itself, closing the loop that many tabletop efforts skip.

How they compare

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

Keep reading

Cybercriminalité

→ Alternatives to Cybercriminalité → What to read after Cybercriminalité