//Books
Cybersecurity books, reviewed honestly.
Reviews aimed at the people who have to actually learn something from these books, engineers, defenders, students. Each entry says who it's for, who it isn't, and what to read alongside it.
Foundations of Information Security
Jason Andress · 2019
Jason Andress' compact tour of the field: confidentiality / integrity / availability, identification and authentication, network and OS controls, written for newcomers and adjacent disciplines.
BeginnerFoundationsDefensiveRead reviewGhost in the Wires
Kevin Mitnick, William L. Simon · 2011
Kevin Mitnick's first-person account of his 1990s social-engineering and phone-system intrusions, foreword by Steve Wozniak. Self-promotional in tone but a primary source on a defining era.
BeginnerNarrativeSocial EngineeringRead reviewGray Hat Hacking
Allen Harper, Ryan Linn, Stephen Sims, Michael Baucom, Daniel Fernandez, Huascar Tejeda, Moses Frost · 2022
A multi-author breadth-first reference covering the modern offensive landscape: web, binary, hardware, IoT, mobile, cloud, and adversarial ML — the closest thing in print to a single-volume snapshot of where offensive security is.
AdvancedPentestingReverse EngineeringRead reviewHacking APIs
Corey J. Ball · 2022
Corey Ball's structured approach to attacking REST and GraphQL APIs: enumeration, auth flaws, business logic, mass assignment, and the testing harness around them.
IntermediateWeb SecurityAppSecRead reviewHacking the Xbox
Andrew "bunnie" Huang · 2003
Andrew "bunnie" Huang on the original Xbox: hardware modding as the entry path into reverse engineering, plus a frank account of the legal fight that followed.
IntermediateHardwareReverse EngineeringRead reviewHacking: The Art of Exploitation
Jon Erickson · 2008
A from-first-principles tour of low-level exploitation that still teaches the mindset two decades later.
IntermediateOffensiveBinary ExploitationRead reviewHacks, Leaks, and Revelations
Micah Lee · 2024
Micah Lee on the operational craft of working with leaked datasets: authentication, OPSEC for sources and journalists, and the Python tooling to actually parse what arrives in your dropbox.
BeginnerOSINTJournalismRead reviewHow Cybersecurity Really Works
Sam Grubb · 2021
Sam Grubb's gentle, exercise-driven introduction for non-specialists who need a working mental model of attacker behaviour and basic defence.
BeginnerFoundationsDefensiveRead reviewIncident Response and Computer Forensics
Jason T. Luttgens, Matthew Pepe, Kevin Mandia · 2014
Luttgens, Pepe, and Mandia's working playbook for running an enterprise IR engagement: pre-engagement readiness, evidence acquisition, network and host forensics, and the project-management discipline that separates a controlled response from a panic.
IntermediateIncident ResponseForensicsRead reviewiOS Application Security
David Thiel · 2016
David Thiel on attacking and defending iOS apps: the platform sandbox, IPC surfaces, keychain semantics, transport security, and the patterns that introduce real bugs.
IntermediateMobileiOSRead reviewKingpin
Kevin Poulsen · 2011
Kevin Poulsen's reconstruction of Max Butler's career — from white-hat consultant to running CardersMarket, the carding forum that consolidated the early-2000s underground — and the FBI investigation that finally took him down.
BeginnerCybercrimeNarrativeRead reviewKubernetes Security
Liz Rice, Michael Hausenblas · 2018
Liz Rice and Michael Hausenblas's freely-available O'Reilly short on the Kubernetes-specific security model: API server, RBAC, network policy, secrets, and the typical hardening steps that move a cluster from default to defensible.
IntermediateCloudContainersRead review