The Hacker Playbook 3: Practical Guide To Penetration Testing book review

A security hacker always exploits weaknesses in a computer system and networks to overcome a problem by using their technical knowledge as the world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved. So you should be able to think like a cybercriminal to reduce risk. The Hacker Playbook 3 will help to increase your ability and is a great framework for running a successful penetration test.


Peter Kim: Most well-known person for The Hacker Playbook series. He has worked for multiple utility companies, fortune 1000 entertainment companies, government agencies, large financial organizations. Peter's wants that his readers will able to think deeply about the security. He helps them to build their career as a security professional.

At first, he wrote The Hacker Playbook. Where he covered many things and provides a solid game plan to the ethical hackers, IT professionals, and security researchers. This book helps the reader by providing many important links to presentations or other books. The book covers a lot of penetration testing aspects and provides useful ways to evade antivirus and create web shells.

Later The Hacker Playbook 2 was also written by him where he doubled the content compared to its predecessor. This is a great book for IT security people which provides information about the latest attacks, tools, lessons and gives you a lab and more customized code. In this book, Peter Kim explains how to achieve pen-testing tasks in a very straight-forward way, along with a brief part about setting up a test environment. This is a very informative textbook for penetration testers with intelligent tutorials, screenshots, explanations, simulations, resources, and a comprehensive layout and design.

The Hacker playbook 3 covers social engineering tips and tricks, physical attacks, password cracking, attack automation, red team reporting and much more which will take your offensive hacking skills, thought processes, and attack paths to the next level. This book answers all your questions and focuses on real-world campaigns and attacks.

This is a great reference book which covers all materials in a logical order. The contents of this book make it different from all other cybersecurity books. This book includes VMs to practice some of the techniques and exploitation methods. There is a vulnerable web application in where you can practice some of the newer web attacks. Each page contains reference and the Red Team flavor describes attacks which make this book a very unique one.

It covers following important topics so that you can utilize the latest tools and labs
  • Advanced web attacks
  • Creative social engineering tactics
  • Evading AV
  • Effective lateral movement
  • Multiple Linux VMs for lateral movement lab
  • Custom THP kali image with all the tools for the labs
  • New recon tools and tactics
  • Cloud vulnerabilities and attacks
  • Compromising the network, Red Team style
  • Building reusable C2 environments
  • Password spraying and finding credentials
  • Lateral movement tips and tricks
  • Privilege escalation tactics
  • Pulling passwords in memory with or without Mimikatz
  • Finding passwords without local admin access
  • Bypassing AV by writing custom malware and droppers for campaigns
  • Bloodhound and mapping out active directory environments
  • Social engineering tips and tricks
  • Custom THP Jenkins XSS payload


If you want to know the latest updates of hacker playbook 3, you can check this Github repo. Also, you can follow their twitter account. If you would like to get in touch with the author or have general inquiries about the book book@thehackerplaybook.com


Conclusion:
This book is for beginners and mid levels candidates. So you won't learn too many things from this book if you know more than that. Again there is too much link which may irritate you.

Overall, this is a very interesting book for new and experienced penetration testers that provide the links to free labs to give you hands-on experience with the material, references, tools, and step by step actionable instructions to widen their perspective and deepen your knowledge and tons of information with real-world experience.

Hope you will definitely love The Hacker Playbook series. You can get this The Hacker Playbook 3: Practical Guide To Penetration Testing book from here.

If you want to get more hacking books, you can check here for best ethical hacking books.


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