The Best Hacking Books 2020

The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws 2nd Edition

This fantastic web app hacking book is a must read for anyone that is interested in web application penetration testing and covers everything you need to know about this subject. The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws 2nd Edition is written by the founder of Portswigger which is the company behind the popular security testing & scanning tool called Burp Suite. This book teaches you step by step how to test the security of web applications from start to finish. One thing I particularly like about this book is that it explains different web technologies, how to exploit them and how to defend against the attack in particular. Furthermore this book covers the very basics a web application penetration tester needs to know in depth, such as how the HTTP protocol works in order to get a better understanding of communications between a webserver and visitor which helps in understanding attacks and defense.

The Shellcoder’s Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes 2nd Edition

Written by the ultimate group of top security experts this book covers everything you need to on how to find security holes in operating systems and applications. You’ll work with the basic building blocks of security bugs, assembler, source code, the stack, the heap, and so on. The prerequisites of this book require you to have basic programming knowledge and understanding of IT concepts but in my opinion this is not enough. This books is expertly written without much introductions or basics which makes this book a pretty hard one to read and definitely not a joke. If you have a good understanding of programming concepts, x86, assembly, exploit development and want to learn more about various types of advanced exploits like stack overflow, heap overflow and exploit development, Return Oriented Programming, Fuzzing, ASLR/DEP handling and a lot more, this book is for you. If you have less technical knowledge and you’re a beginner on these subjects you’ll probably end up researching a lot of this stuff as a side effect of reading this book (which is not a bad thing though!).

Web Hacking 101

Web Hacking 101 is written by Peter Yaworski (with a foreword by HackerOne Co-Founders Michiel Prins and Jobert Abma) and explains common vulnerabilities found in web applications using publicly disclosed vulnerability reports on bug bounty programs. The book covers vulnerability reports on Cross site scripting (XSS), Cross site request forgery (CSRF), Remote Code Execution (RCE) and many more vulnerability types. Each report is analysed by the author and includes details about the vulnerability, a clear description and the reward that was paid. With this book you won’t just learn about the vulnerabilities and how they were exploited but also their context, the impact and how to recognize them on your own bug bounty hunts. Finally the book also provides an overview of bug bounty platforms, tools, blogs and some cheat sheets to get started with bug bounty hunting right away. The book is available at Leanpub.com for as low as $9.99 which is a great value for the money.

Penetration Testing: A Hands-On Introduction to Hacking

The first book I would like to recommend is a hacking book that has helped many people to make their first steps into ethical hacking and penetration testing. Penetration Testing: A Hands-On Introduction to Hacking is written by Georgia Weidman and is a good book for anyone new to the subjects as it generally focuses on beginners. The author of this book covers many different subjects such as setting up a lab to enumeration, exploitation, mobile hacking and a lot more. What I personally like about this book is that the author explains every step in the process in detail and also relates it to her wide experience in the field as a penetration tester. So if you’re new to penetration testing without prior experience, this book is a great place to start an exciting journey!

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