// Comparison

Hacking vs Pentesting Azure Applications: Which Should You Read?

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

Intermediate

3/52013

Un labo virtuel pour auditer et mettre en place des contre-mesures

Franck Ebel, Jérôme Hennecart

A hands-on French guide to building a virtual lab (Proxmox) and using it to audit application, web and system flaws — then implement countermeasures.

Intermediate

3/52018

Pentesting Azure Applications

The Definitive Guide to Testing and Securing Deployments

Matt Burrough

Matt Burrough on attacker behaviour against Azure tenants: identity, storage, VMs, key material handling, and the recon paths that work against real subscriptions.

Read this if

Learners and junior pentesters who want to stand up a safe practice lab and work through real vulnerability classes and their fixes, in French. Practical and setup-focused.

Cloud pentesters whose scope includes Azure subscriptions. Burrough covers identity (Entra ID), storage account abuse, VM-level recon, key material handling, and the role-based access patterns that drive real Azure post-exploitation.

Skip this if

Advanced practitioners or those wanting current cloud-era tradecraft; it's a 2013 lab-build guide, so the specific stack has aged.

Readers focused on AWS or GCP, or anyone wanting current Azure tradecraft. The book pre-dates the current AAD-now-Entra-ID rebrand and several major service updates; treat it as foundational, not current.

Key takeaways

A practical French guide to building your own vulnerability lab and auditing it end to end.
Covers application, web and system flaws with the matching countermeasures — attack and defence together.
From 2013: the method holds, but expect to modernise the specific tools and lab stack.

Azure attack patterns center on identity and roles, not network-level vulnerabilities; the book's framing reflects that.
Storage account misconfigurations remain one of the most common Azure findings; the book's coverage of access-key abuse is still relevant.
Cloud pentest reporting differs meaningfully from network pentest reporting; the book's deliverable templates are useful starting points.

How they compare

Hacking and Pentesting Azure Applications are both rated 3/5 in our catalog. Pick by topic preference and reading style rather than by rating.

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

Hacking and Pentesting Azure Applications both cover Offensive, Pentesting, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

Keep reading

Hacking

→ Alternatives to Hacking → What to read after Hacking