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Gray Hat Hacking vs Les virus informatiques : théorie, pratique et applications: Which Should You Read?

Two cybersecurity books on Reverse Engineering, 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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5/52009

Les virus informatiques : théorie, pratique et applications

Éric Filiol

Éric Filiol's reference French-language treatment of computer virology. Formal theory, infection mechanisms, offensive and defensive applications, with academic rigor rare on the topic.

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-reading security students, researchers, advanced malware analysts who want a formal treatment — French-language literature on the topic is thin.

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 looking for a tooling manual or introduction. Filiol writes dense; algorithmic and systems fundamentals are required.

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.

Prix Roberval 2005 (higher-education category) — one of the few French cyber books awarded at that level.
Filiol is a former military cryptanalyst and ran ESAT then ESIEA's virology lab; academic sourcing is visible chapter by chapter.
The only French-language book that treats computer virology with university-textbook rigor.

How they compare

We rate Les virus informatiques : théorie, pratique et applications higher (5/5 against 4/5 for Gray Hat Hacking). For most readers, that means Les virus informatiques : théorie, pratique et applications is the primary pick and Gray Hat Hacking is a useful follow-up.

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

Gray Hat Hacking and Les virus informatiques : théorie, pratique et applications both cover Reverse Engineering, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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