// Comparison

Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking vs The Hacker Playbook 3: 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

4/52022

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.”

Intermediate

4/52018

The Hacker Playbook 3

Practical Guide to Penetration Testing — Red Team Edition

Peter Kim

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.

Read this if

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.

Junior-to-mid red teamers and pentesters moving past CTFs into corporate engagements who want a coherent narrative of how an op flows. The strongest part is the assumed-breach mindset — the assumption that you start from a foothold and have to make it count.

Skip this if

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.

Readers expecting 2024-current tradecraft. Cobalt Strike, Sliver, EDR-bypass research, and modern identity attacks (AAD, conditional access, OAuth abuse) have all moved on since 2018. Treat the techniques as concepts, not commands.

Key takeaways

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.

Assumed breach is the right starting frame for almost any modern engagement; perimeter-to-DA scenarios are increasingly fiction.
The book's value is the workflow — recon, foothold, escalate, persist, exfil — not the specific tools used to demonstrate it.
Pair every chapter with a current blog source; the toolchain rotates faster than print can track.

How they compare

Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking and The Hacker Playbook 3 are both rated 4/5 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.

Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking and The Hacker Playbook 3 both cover Offensive, Pentesting, so reading them in sequence reinforces the same material from different angles.

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Sécurité informatique - Ethical Hacking

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