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Practical IoT Hacking vs The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook: Which Should You Read?

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

Intermediate

4/52021

The Definitive Guide to Attacking the Internet of Things

Fotios Chantzis, Ioannis Stais, Paulino Calderon, Evangelos Deirmentzoglou, Beau Woods

Five-author guide to IoT pentesting covering hardware probing, radio (BLE / Zigbee / LoRa), embedded firmware, and the protocols that connect cheap devices to vulnerable backends.

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

Pentesters branching into hardware and embedded targets. The book's coverage spans hardware probing (UART, JTAG, SWD), radio (BLE, Zigbee, LoRa), firmware analysis, and the protocols cheap devices speak to vulnerable backends. The most current general IoT book in print.

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

Pure software pentesters who don't want a hardware bench. Several chapters require oscilloscope, logic analyzer, or SDR access to follow.

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

IoT is a stack: hardware, firmware, protocols, cloud. The book's strength is teaching all four as one continuous attack surface.
Radio attacks (BLE, Zigbee, LoRa) are now mainstream pentest territory; the chapters introducing SDR-based analysis are the practical entry point.
Firmware extraction-then-analysis is the core skill; the book's hardware chapters cover the extraction half, then hand off to standard binary-analysis tooling for the rest.

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

Practical IoT Hacking 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.

Practical IoT Hacking is pitched at intermediate level. The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook is pitched at advanced level. Read the easier one first if you're not yet comfortable with the topic.

Practical IoT Hacking and The Spacecraft Hacker's Handbook both cover IoT, Hardware, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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Practical IoT Hacking

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