If you are someone that loves reading books and has a taste for Ethical Hacking or Penetration Testing then you will love our list of The Best Hacking Books 2022!
One of the most frequently asked questions by many of my blog readers ask me is “What is the best hacking book for beginners? Or If I can recommend them about the best hacking book?” That’s why I am writing a complete article on “The Best Books related to Hacking”.
In this article, I am going to highlight some of the hacking books that I have personally read and learned a lot from these books such as ethical hacking, web application penetration testing and other penetration testing subjects. These will include books to learn about penetration testing.
Even though if you are a total beginner to the ethical hacking, seasoned professional and the field of InfoSec it will open up many doors of new skills for you and will also allow you to speed up the progress in your career.
But if you want to become a total expert in the following fields of a Penetration tester, IT Professional or Bug Bounty Hunter then you will also have to read the books related to the subjects which will help you to become an expert in those particular fields. These books can be on the following subjects or topics: Programming, Exploit development, programming, network security monitoring, web applications, and other IT-related subjects.
You should at least have a little bit of theoretical knowledge about the subjects mentioned in the above paragraph. Because a little bit knowledge of these subjects will help you a lot to have the information of security according to the different perspectives and experiences of different people.
For this particular reason, I am not only going to list and explain the hacking books in this article but I will also add some of the books about the related subjects which will make it a whole lot easier to perform ethical hacking in your Personal Computer (PC). According to my view or opinion, every IT related persons should read the books related to their field. You can also read a single book for a month if you are that much busy person.
Contents
The Best Hacking Books – Learning to Hack has never been easier
The books below cover multiple topics in white hat hacking, red teaming, penetration testing, and network security monitoring.
Penetration Testing (A Hands-On Introduction to Hacking)
The first hacking book that I would really love to recommend you is “Penetration Testing (A Hands-On Introduction to Hacking)” written by “Georgia Weidman”. This book is the first step for beginners into the world of penetration testing and ethical hacking. This is a very good book for all beginners and for people who are new to the subject of Penetration Testing.
The author of this book has covered many other IT-related subjects such as mobile hacking, setting up a lab for enumeration, exploitation, and a lot of other subjects. The most awesome thing that I personally like about this book is that all of the processes are expressed in a totally detailed manner by the author and she also has shared a wide range of the experiences that she faced in her real life as a penetration tester. If you are totally new to penetration testing without any experience with this particular subject, then this book is really good for you to learn all of the new things about Penetration testing.
Buy Penetration Testing Book: A Hands-on Introduction
The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook (Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws 2nd Edition)
This awesome book for web app hacking is a very good book for the people who are interested in the penetration testing of web applications and this book also covers all the important topics or subjects that are a must-read for all the IT-related people or the person interested in Web Hacking. This book “The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook (Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws 2nd Edition)” is written by the owner of the company named Portswigger which is a very famous company for the popular scanning tool and security testing named Burp Suite.
This book consists of the step-by-step procedure which guides you on how to test the security of the Web Applications from the extreme start to the end. There is one thing that I personally like in this book the explanations which are added in this book for the different web technologies. These explanations are on how to defend against the attack in web applications or how to exploit the different web technologies.
This book also covers all the basic information related to the very basic web application penetration tester. It contains all the in-depth information and the protocol working of the HTTP in order to get better communication in between the server and the visitor or user which helps in understanding the attack and preparing for the defense against it.
Buy The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook 2nd Edition
Read: How to Hack WiFi Passwords (PMKID New Attack Method)
The Shellcoder’s Handbook (Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes 3rd Edition)
This is a very good handbook on the Exploiting security holes. The authors of this book are from a group of top security experts. This covers all of the information that you want for the learning of the finding of the security holes in the Operating System (OS) and all of its applications. In this book, you will learn about how to work on the assembler, basic building blocks of security bugs, the stacks, the heaps and all the other concepts. The concepts that you should know about before using the techniques in this book are basic programming and the understanding of the various IT Concepts but according to my view, it is not enough.
But there is a little shortcoming of this book which is that this book is written by the experts without much basic information which makes this book a little tough to read and understand.
But if you are really good in Programming concepts of the assembly language, the x86, exploit development, Object-Oriented Programming, Fuzzing, a heap overflow, and all others. If you have a little bit of problem and lack information about these concepts or if you are an extreme beginner in these subjects then this book is definitely not for you.
Buy The Shellcoders Handbook (Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes)
Read: How to DDoS Like a Professional Hacker (Legal Way).
Web Hacking 101 – How to Make Money Hacking Ethically
This awesome book for Web Hacking is written by “Peter Yaworski” (with a prologue by the hacker one Co-Founders Jobert Abma & Michiel Prins). This book explains all of the common vulnerabilities found over web applications by the help of publicly disclosed vulnerability reports. This book also covers all of the vulnerabilities reported on the following: Remote Code Execution (RCE), Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and all the other vulnerabilities types.
Furthermore, the author of this book has included every single detail and description of all of the vulnerabilities that can be found over the internet. With this single book, you won’t only gain knowledge about the vulnerabilities and how they were exploited but you will also learn about their context, impacts and how to recognize these vulnerabilities on your very own bug bounty and the Internet. The book also provides an overview about or on the bug bounty tools, blogs, platforms, and all the cheat sheets to fully get started with bug bounty hunting.
Get Web Hacking 101Read: 10 Best WiFi Hacking Tools in Kali Linux to Hack Wireless Passwords.
Applied Network Security Monitoring (Collection, Detection, and Analysis)
This is a really good book with all the practical examples which are going to help you in learning Network Security Monitoring (NSM). This great book is going to help you a lot in becoming the NSM Analyst and it also teaches you all of the core concepts of NSM which are accompanied by many real-time examples experienced by the author himself. This book is one of the best guides related to Network security that I read.
The Authors of this book are “Jason Smith & Chris Sanders”. They have really experienced person in the field of the Network Security Monitoring and they also have the teaching experience and they have written this book with a complete and a very easy guide through which you can easily understand even if you are totally new in this subject. These authors also have offered online courses on the different IT-related concepts you can search for them on the Internet.
Buy Applied Network Security Monitoring Book
Also read: Top 8 Best Linux Distros for Hacking and Penetration Testing.
Advanced Penetration Testing (Hacking the world’s most secure networks)
This book is not for beginners because it consists of the advanced functionalities on Penetration testing. The author of this book is “Wiley” It consists of all of the information according to that specific topic with all the right perspectives. In this book, the author has written about all of the Advanced Persistent Threat (ATP) and the attack simulation. These techniques are way more beyond the vulnerability scanners and the Metasploit. The subject that this book covers are malware, highly secured networks, C&C structures, setting up C2 servers, social engineering and all of the data exfiltration techniques.
All of the chapters of this book briefly describe the ATP modeling opposite to the organization in specific industries such as Banks, Hospitals and various Pharmaceutical Companies. These industries also give all the readers a very broad and clear view on how the industries create different assets to protect themselves, and about how they are being protected and by whom. The author of this book is a very good and experienced penetration tester/red teamer and all of the scenarios and personal experiences are added in this book by its author.
Buy Advanced Penetration Testing Book (2nd Edition)
Read: Metasploit Commands List.
Update:
Please keep an eye on our Hacking guides for more information on how to use the tools mentioned in these books.
Which Hacking Book are you reading?
In this article, we talked about The Best Books related to Hacking. We also talked about these books in detail and all the information related to their purpose and authors. There are more hacking books over the internet that you can read to get help about hacking.
Those were all the books that are perfect for you to learn ethical hacking. I hope these books will be really helpful to you before you end this article I would like to give you the advice to be safe while doing any sort of hacking you are being watched every time.
The hacking books shared above can be used by people with little or no knowledge of hacking as well! We always encourage beginners to have a go.
That was all for this article share this useful information with all of your friends and family members and help them to become Ethical Hacker or Penetration Tester too.
