Hacking the Hacker

Learn From the Experts Who Take Down Hackers

By: Roger A. Grimes

Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross

Hacking the Hacker takes you inside the world of cybersecurity to show you what goes on behind the scenes, and introduces you to the men and women on the front lines of this technological arms race. Twenty-six of the world's top white hat hackers, security researchers, writers, and leaders describe what they do and why, with each profile preceded by a no-experience-necessary explanation of the relevant technology.

Cybersecurity is becoming increasingly critical at all levels, from retail businesses all the way up to national security. This book drives to the heart of the field, introducing the people and practices that help keep our world secure.

• Go deep into the world of white hat hacking to grasp just how critical cybersecurity is
• Listen to the stories of some of the world's most renowned computer security experts
• Delve into social engineering, cryptography, penetration testing, network attacks, and more

As a field, cybersecurity is large and multi-faceted - yet not historically diverse. With a massive demand for qualified professional that is only going to grow, opportunities are endless. Hacking the Hacker shows you why you should give the field a closer look.

©2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (P)2019 Tantor

Worth the read - depending on what you're seeking

My biggest issue with this book is that I found the title misleading. Based on that I thought the book would spend more time talking about offensive tactics used to actively take down hackers. It really didn't talk about that at all. It was entirely focused on defensive tactics like detection or honeypots. In fact, the author took a pretty hard line stance on not doing anything illegal ever, which seems to encompass hacking into a hacker's machine. Because of this I think the book is pretty poorly named, but maybe I took the title too literally.

With that said, I think this book does a nice job of profiling influential people in the security industry, many of which I had never heard of before. I found these chapters of the book the most interesting, and taught me a bunch of history that I didn't previously know about. It also gave a bunch of references for other books that I am interested in reading.

Pros:
- It has interesting interviews and profiles of notable figures in computer security.
- It has lots of references to other potentially interesting reading material.

Cons:
- It barely mentions anything about actually "Hacking the hacker"
- The non-profile chapters cover topics at a pretty surface level, so if you already have basic computer security knowledge these chapters may be a bit dull or arduous.

Conclusion:
If you're looking for an interesting history book on computer security, I think it's certainly worth the read. If you're just looking for applicable computer security knowledge beyond general philosophy behind computer security, skip this one and look elsewhere.

We don’t need to read out every single url in detail

Book would be amazing, but listening to him literally read out every single complete url including &$?/ etc… gets very tedious. We get it, one single link read out that leads us to all the links would suffice

Tribe of Hackers Meets Security/Tutorial Book

I saw this book in the store several times but never picked it up due to the title making me think it was trying to make you literally hack the hacker (which I thought was cringey). I clicked on the sample and was happily surprised as a lot of cybersecurity books don't have great 'listen-ability". The performance was great and kept my attention.

The book was nice talking about some fun stories and information about cybersecurity while going through interviews similar to Tribe of Hackers. I thought it was a great book overall and great listen.

This is a great book!

I really enjoyed this books mix of details and positive motivation. As someone who sits around 30 books a year, this is in my top 5 of all time and top cyber security book.

Reading of lengthy URLs

This book would have been much more enjoyable in print format. There was a poor choice made to have the narrator read lengthy URLs like a robot that made listening fairly unenjoyable. No one would have been listening and copying down the obscure URLs mentioned in order to type them in a browser. it felt inauthentic and impractical. A list of URLs could have been provided somewhere and it could have been mentioned that proper URLs could be found at that list otherwise I would have given it 5 stars.

Please stop reading the urls

There's gotta be a better way to advertise for your friends books than having the reader pronounce double u double u dot ... Every single minute

A Great Beginners Book

An interesting perspective that profiles a lot of security professionals and the industry in general. I really appreciated all of the resources in this book and took plenty of "clips." As someone who already works in cyber intel I still had plenty to learn from this book.

For begginers

This book has good references, but an advanced reader will find these resources very basic.

No real information here

This book is basically some guy pimping people he knows and their websites and books. There is no real insight into anything.

Urls for recommended books

Whoever decided it was a great idea to read aloud the amazon URLs of book titles with the full URL (that can become obsolete) is a complete moron and makes this otherwise informative book highly irritating.