// Alternatives
Alternatives to Practical Social Engineering
Books in our catalog with overlapping topics and a similar reading level to Practical Social Engineering. If Practical Social Engineering is the wrong fit at intermediate level, start here.
01 · 2018
Social Engineering
Christopher Hadnagy's broad procedural reference on social engineering as a discipline — recon, pretexting, elicitation, microexpressions, and the structured engagement model his consultancy operationalized.
Intermediate4/5Christopher Hadnagy02 · 2024
Extreme Privacy
Michael Bazzell's defender-side companion to OSINT Techniques: a step-by-step program for removing yourself from data brokers, public records, and the everyday surveillance economy without going off-grid.
Intermediate5/5Michael Bazzell03 · 2024
OSINT Techniques
Michael Bazzell's relentlessly updated technical manual for finding people, accounts, breach data, geolocation evidence, and online identifiers — the de facto reference of the modern OSINT field.
Intermediate5/5Michael Bazzell04 · 2025
Metasploit
The second edition of the definitive No Starch guide to the Metasploit Framework, updated by the project's original maintainers and newer contributors for the modern Framework.
Intermediate4/5David Kennedy, Mati Aharoni, Devon Kearns, Jim O'Gorman, Daniel G. Graham05 · 2022
Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking
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.”
Intermediate4/5ACISSI06 · 2018
The Hacker Playbook 3
Peter Kim's hands-on red-team field manual: assumed-breach scenarios, lateral movement, AV/EDR evasion, and the operational rhythm of a real engagement rather than a checklist of CVEs.
Intermediate4/5Peter Kim07 · 2018
Pentesting Azure Applications
Matt Burrough on attacker behaviour against Azure tenants: identity, storage, VMs, key material handling, and the recon paths that work against real subscriptions.
Intermediate3/5Matt Burrough08 · 2015
The Mobile Application Hacker's Handbook
Chell, Erasmus, Colley, and Whitehouse's reference on iOS and Android application security from the early-mid 2010s — runtime hooking, transport security, IPC abuse, and the platform-specific surface of mobile pentesting.
Intermediate3/5Dominic Chell, Tyrone Erasmus, Shaun Colley, Ollie Whitehouse09 · 2018
Open Source Intelligence Techniques and Tools
Hassan and Hijazi's pedagogical introduction to OSINT framed inside the broader intelligence cycle (collection → processing → analysis → dissemination) rather than around a specific toolchain.
Beginner3/5Nihad A. Hassan, Rami Hijazi10 · 2013
Hacking
A hands-on French guide to building a virtual lab (Proxmox) and using it to audit application, web and system flaws — then implement countermeasures.
Intermediate3/5Franck Ebel, Jérôme Hennecart