Introduction

There aren’t many books on the subject of leading hackers. Trust me, I’ve looked. But if you look for a book on how to hack, you’ll find them by the truckload. In fact, if you took the number of books on offensive cybersecurity and compared it to the number of books written about other areas of cybersecurity or even information technology (IT) in general, you could easily assume that the field of hacking is one of the largest within IT. Of course, anyone familiar with the field will tell you that penetration testing is a relatively small subset within the cybersecurity industry. The majority of cybersecurity professionals are working to identify, defend, detect, and respond to threats. So why then is the literature on the technical subject of offensive cybersecurity so prolific?