//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.
Pentesting Azure Applications
Matt Burrough · 2018
Matt Burrough on attacker behaviour against Azure tenants: identity, storage, VMs, key material handling, and the recon paths that work against real subscriptions.
IntermediateCloudPentestingRead reviewPermanent Record
Edward Snowden · 2019
Edward Snowden's first-person memoir: the technical work that led him into the NSA's mass-surveillance programs, his reasoning for disclosure, and the Hong Kong handoff to the journalists who broke the story.
BeginnerPrivacySurveillanceRead reviewPractical Binary Analysis
Dennis Andriesse · 2018
Dennis Andriesse on the binary toolchain you can actually script: ELF internals, dynamic taint analysis, symbolic execution and instrumentation with concrete code-along examples.
AdvancedBinary AnalysisReverse EngineeringRead reviewPractical IoT Hacking
Fotios Chantzis, Ioannis Stais, Paulino Calderon, Evangelos Deirmentzoglou, Beau Woods · 2021
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.
IntermediateIoTHardwareRead reviewPractical Linux Forensics
Bruce Nikkel · 2021
Bruce Nikkel's reference for forensic analysts working post-mortem on Linux images: filesystems, journaling, logs, persistence locations, and the chain of custody discipline around them.
IntermediateForensicsLinuxRead reviewPractical Malware Analysis
Michael Sikorski, Andrew Honig · 2012
Still the gold standard textbook for static and dynamic malware analysis on Windows.
IntermediateMalwareReverse EngineeringRead reviewPractical Packet Analysis
Chris Sanders · 2017
Chris Sanders' working manual for Wireshark, geared at troubleshooting and incident response rather than abstract protocol theory. Updated for Wireshark 2.x.
BeginnerNetworkingProtocol AnalysisRead reviewPractical Reverse Engineering
Bruce Dang, Alexandre Gazet, Elias Bachaalany · 2014
A working reverser's textbook from three Microsoft / Quarkslab veterans, covering the architectures and toolchain you'll actually meet on real targets, including the Windows kernel and modern obfuscation patterns.
AdvancedReverse EngineeringMalwareRead reviewPractical Social Engineering
Joe Gray · 2022
Joe Gray's working manual for the social-engineering side of red team and threat intel: OSINT-driven recon, pretexting, phishing infrastructure, and the legal and ethical boundaries that separate professional work from criminal activity.
IntermediateSocial EngineeringOSINTRead reviewReal-World Bug Hunting
Peter Yaworski · 2019
Peter Yaworski breaks down real disclosed reports across major bug bounty programs, organized by vulnerability class, so readers can pattern-match real findings rather than learn classes from textbook examples.
BeginnerWeb SecurityOffensiveRead reviewReal-World Cryptography
David Wong · 2021
David Wong's hands-on tour of the cryptographic primitives, protocols and pitfalls that show up in actual production systems, with deliberate attention to TLS, Noise, modern AEAD, and post-quantum.
IntermediateCryptographyAppSecRead reviewRootkits and Bootkits
Alex Matrosov, Eugene Rodionov, Sergey Bratus · 2019
Matrosov, Rodionov and Bratus on persistent, deeply-embedded malware: kernel rootkits, MBR/UEFI bootkits, and the forensic techniques that surface them. Strongly Windows-internals oriented.
AdvancedMalwareReverse EngineeringRead review