// Comparison

Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercises vs Tribe of Hackers: Which Should You Read?

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

Intermediate

4/52024

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.

Beginner

3/52019

Tribe of Hackers

Cybersecurity Advice from the Best Hackers in the World

Marcus J. Carey, Jennifer Jin

An interview anthology of practitioners answering the same set of career and craft questions, useful as a wide-angle view of how working security people actually think about the field.

Read this if

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.

Newcomers and career-shifters who want a wide-angle view of how working security people actually think. The interview format pulls signal across roles (red team, blue team, IR, AppSec, leadership) without committing to any single voice.

Skip this if

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.

Experienced practitioners. The interviews are short and the same questions repeat; you've heard much of it at conferences. Specialists looking for technical depth should pick books in their lane instead.

Key takeaways

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.

The book's structure (same questions to many voices) is unusually useful for spotting consensus and disagreement; what most respondents agree on tends to be true.
Career advice in security is unusually consistent across the field: communicate, document, ship, mentor, repeat. The book makes this visible.
Diversity of voice across the panel (junior to CISO, offensive to defensive) is the value; pick interviews to match your current question, not read straight through.

How they compare

We rate Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercises higher (4/5 against 3/5 for Tribe of Hackers). For most readers, that means Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercises is the primary pick and Tribe of Hackers is a useful follow-up.

Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercises is pitched at intermediate level. Tribe of Hackers is pitched at beginner level. Read the easier one first if you're not yet comfortable with the topic.

Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercises and Tribe of Hackers both cover Career, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

Keep reading

Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercises

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