// Prerequisites
What to read before Windows Security Internals
If Windows Security Internals feels too steep at advanced level, here is what to read first. Lighter books in the same topics that build the prerequisites this one assumes.
01 · 2011
A Bug Hunter's Diary
Tobias Klein walks through seven real vulnerabilities he found and exploited, in the form of personal lab notes, what he tried, what failed, and what eventually shipped to vendors.
Intermediate4/5Tobias Klein02 · 2026
Hacking et Cyberdéfense
Two working pentesters who also teach the material walk through the full Active Directory kill chain, offense and defense both, in an expert-level French-language audit manual.
Advanced4/5Jacques Beirnaert-Huvelle, Guillaume Morelle03 · 2008
Hacking: The Art of Exploitation
A from-first-principles tour of low-level exploitation that still teaches the mindset two decades later.
Intermediate5/5Jon Erickson04 · 2024
Black Hat Bash
Nick Aleks and Dolev Farhi on getting offensive work done with the shell: privilege escalation tooling, lateral movement, and pipelining bash with the rest of the toolkit.
Intermediate4/5Nick Aleks, Dolev Farhi05 · 2020
Black Hat Go
Tom Steele, Chris Patten, and Dan Kottmann show how to use Go's networking primitives, concurrency model, and cross-compilation to write offensive tooling that runs almost anywhere.
Intermediate4/5Tom Steele, Chris Patten, Dan Kottmann06 · 2023
Black Hat GraphQL
Aleks and Farhi on attacking GraphQL specifically: introspection abuse, batching, depth and complexity attacks, auth flaws, and the differences from REST that make GraphQL pentests their own discipline.
Intermediate4/5Nick Aleks, Dolev Farhi07 · 2021
Black Hat Python
Justin Seitz and Tim Arnold's hands-on tour of writing offensive tooling in Python: network sniffers, web scrapers, GitHub-based command-and-control, screen capture, keylogging, and Volatility extensions.
Intermediate4/5Justin Seitz, Tim Arnold08 · 2022
Hacking APIs
Corey Ball's structured approach to attacking REST and GraphQL APIs: enumeration, auth flaws, business logic, mass assignment, and the testing harness around them.
Intermediate4/5Corey J. Ball