// Comparison

Gray Hat Hacking vs Hacking et Cyberdéfense: Which Should You Read?

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

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4/52022

Gray Hat Hacking

The Ethical Hacker's Handbook

Allen Harper, Ryan Linn, Stephen Sims, Michael Baucom, Daniel Fernandez, Huascar Tejeda, Moses Frost

A multi-author breadth-first reference covering the modern offensive landscape: web, binary, hardware, IoT, mobile, cloud, and adversarial ML — the closest thing in print to a single-volume snapshot of where offensive security is.

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4/52026

Hacking et Cyberdéfense

Auditer son environnement Windows

Jacques Beirnaert-Huvelle, Guillaume Morelle

Two working pentesters who also teach the material walk through the full Active Directory kill chain, offense and defense both, in an expert-level French-language audit manual.

Read this if

Mid-career pentesters and red teamers who need a single reference that touches every adjacent domain, plus students preparing for OSCP/OSEP-style breadth assessments. Each chapter is written by a domain practitioner and tends to be more current than the typical comprehensive textbook.

French-speaking Windows administrators and security practitioners who already know the basics and want one book covering the whole Active Directory attack lifecycle, enumeration, exploitation, privilege escalation, lateral movement, persistence, and trust-relationship abuse, paired with the Tier-based defenses that actually stop it.

Skip this if

Readers wanting depth in any single domain — every chapter is the start of a topic, not the conclusion. Also uneven by chapter, which is the cost of multi-author breadth; some chapters are excellent and some are surveys.

Readers who don't read French, or beginners without prior Windows/AD or pentesting fundamentals; the publisher pitches this explicitly as an expert-level text, not an introduction.

Key takeaways

Use it as a sampler menu: the chapters you don't already know are where the value is, and the bibliographies point at the deeper books.
The exploitation chapters age fastest; the IoT, automotive, and ML-security chapters are the strongest current reason to own this edition.
Best read as a 'what should I learn next' tool rather than as a sequential textbook.

Has readers build a disposable AD lab (GOAD, NetExec-Lab) so every attack chapter is run hands-on instead of read as theory.
Covers the full AD attack lifecycle end to end, from LDAP/Kerberos fundamentals through post-exploitation and trust-relationship abuse.
Pairs the offense with a dedicated defense chapter on Tier architecture, AGDLP, and risk-prevention policy, making it as much an audit manual as an attack manual.

How they compare

Gray Hat Hacking and Hacking et Cyberdéfense 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.

Gray Hat Hacking and Hacking et Cyberdéfense both cover Pentesting, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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