Best cybersecurity books from 2019

Sandworm

A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

Long-form journalism on the GRU's hacking operations, the best non-technical book on what state-level cyber actually looks like.

The Pragmatic Programmer

Your Journey to Mastery

Thomas and Hunt's career-defining set of practical heuristics for writing software professionally — orthogonality, broken-windows, DRY, tracer bullets, and the underlying argument that craftsmanship is a posture, not a process.

Cult of the Dead Cow

How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World

Joseph Menn's history of cDc — the Texas-rooted hacking collective that coined 'hacktivism', shipped Back Orifice, and threaded its way through three decades of the security industry's coming-of-age.

Foundations of Information Security

A Straightforward Introduction

Jason Andress' compact tour of the field: confidentiality / integrity / availability, identification and authentication, network and OS controls, written for newcomers and adjacent disciplines.

Permanent Record

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.

Real-World Bug Hunting

A Field Guide to Web Hacking

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.

Rootkits and Bootkits

Reversing Modern Malware and Next Generation Threats

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.

Tribe of Hackers

Cybersecurity Advice from the Best Hackers in the World

An interview anthology of practitioners answering the same set of career and craft questions, useful as a wide-angle view of how working security people actually think about the field.