// Comparison

Hacking vs Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking: 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

4/52022

Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking

Apprendre l'attaque pour mieux se défendre

ACISSI

The French-language reference for offensive security: a thick, lab-heavy tour of the attacker's toolkit, maintained across editions by the ACISSI collective under the motto “learn the attack to better defend.”

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.

French-speaking students and aspiring pentesters who want one comprehensive offensive-security manual: reconnaissance, network and web attacks, social engineering, forensics and Metasploit, all hands-on. The closest French equivalent to the English pentest canon.

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.

Advanced practitioners who already work in English and live in PortSwigger Academy and current tooling. The breadth means each topic is an introduction rather than a deep dive, and editions lag the fastest-moving tradecraft.

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.

The single most complete offensive-security book in French — breadth is the selling point, covering recon through forensics in one volume.
Every chapter is exercise-driven; treated as a workbook with a lab VM it teaches well, read passively it teaches little.
Multi-author and re-edited regularly, so quality is uneven chapter to chapter but currency beats most French tech books.

How they compare

We rate Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking higher (4/5 against 3/5 for Hacking). For most readers, that means Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking is the primary pick and Hacking is a useful follow-up.

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

Hacking and Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking 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