// Comparison

Evading EDR vs The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook: Which Should You Read?

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

Advanced

4/52024

The Definitive Guide to Defeating Endpoint Detection Systems

Matt Hand

A component-by-component teardown of how modern EDR sensors actually collect telemetry, and where each data source can be starved, blinded, or bypassed.

Advanced

4/52026

The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook

Exploiting Ground Stations, Flight Software, and Satellite Terminals

Andrzej Olchawa, Milenko Starcik

A hands-on tour of the full attack surface of a modern space system, from the ground stations that send commands to the flight software on the spacecraft and the satellite terminals that consume the signal.

Read this if

Red teamers and detection engineers who want to reason about EDR from the sensor up rather than copy-pasting the bypass of the week.

Hardware and embedded security practitioners who want to extend offensive skills into an attack surface that increasingly underpins internet, GPS, weather, and defense infrastructure. Hands-on labs have readers write working exploits against flight software, not just read case studies.

Skip this if

Anyone wanting a turnkey list of working bypasses. Skip this if you don't run Windows or won't sit through the internals.

Readers without hardware or embedded-systems fundamentals already in place; this is a genuinely novel, narrow domain built on top of general hardware-hacking skills, not a substitute for learning them. Start with The Hardware Hacking Handbook or The Car Hacker's Handbook first if those basics aren't there yet.

Key takeaways

EDR is a collection of telemetry sources, not a monolith; evasion means knowing which source sees what.
Most durable bypasses attack the sensor's data collection, not its detection logic.
Vendor-agnostic understanding outlives any specific bypass, which vendors patch fast.

Covers all three legs of a space system's attack surface (ground stations, flight software, satellite terminals) rather than just one.
Hands-on labs produce working exploits against real flight-software patterns, keeping the material concrete instead of theoretical.
A domain that is only going to matter more as commercial satellite infrastructure underpins everyday internet and GPS services.

How they compare

Evading EDR and The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook are both rated 4/5 in our catalog. Pick by topic preference and reading style rather than by rating.

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

Evading EDR and The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook both cover Offensive, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

Keep reading

Evading EDR

→ Alternatives to Evading EDR → What to read after Evading EDR