18 Best Cyber Security Books and Ethical Hacking Books in 2025

What is Cybersecurity?

Before we discuss the best cybersecurity books, let's give you a quick refresher on cybersecurity. Cybersecurity refers to protecting programs, networks, computer systems, and their components from unauthorized digital access and attacks, which we call cyberattacks.

Cyberattacks result in organizations losing confidential data and access, money, and reputation. Hence, it is crucial to prevent cyberattacks and implement cybersecurity measures.

What is Ethical Hacking?

Ethical hacking is the process of discovering and exploiting a system's vulnerability. We carry this out to ensure system security.

We know individuals who perform ethical hacking are ethical hackers. Ethical hackers do this only with prior permission from the concerned authorities. Various hacking techniques and tools are used to carry out ethical hacking.

Let us now take you through the list of the best cybersecurity books.

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The Cybersecurity Books

We have formulated a list of the best cybersecurity and ethical hacking books to help learners. Let's get started:

1. Hacking: A Beginners’ Guide to Computer Hacking, Basic Security, And Penetration Testing

Author: John Slavio

• This book on hacking is handy for beginners. It can help you take the first step in your ethical hacking career.
• This book covers the history of hacking, types of hackers, various hacking attacks, essential hacking tools and software, and hiding IP addresses.
• It also discusses mobile hacking, email address hacking, penetration testing, and spoofing attacks.

2. Hacking: The Art Of Exploitation

Author: Jon Erickson

• This world-famous hacking book has two editions, one published in 2003 and the other in 2008.
• It focuses on network security and computer security. The second edition of this book introduces you to C programming from a hacker's perspective. Here, you will learn to program computers using C and shell scripts.
• Out of the many concepts in this book, you will also learn to hijack TCP connections, Crack encrypted wireless traffic, and speed up brute-force attacks.

3. Metasploit: The Penetration Tester’s Guide

Authors: David Kennedy, Jim O'Gorman, Devon Kearns, and Mati Aharoni

• A Metasploit framework is a vital tool hackers use to discover and exploit vulnerabilities. However, for first-time users, it can be a little challenging. Hence, this book will teach you all about Metasploit.
• In this book, you'll learn the framework's interfaces, module system, and advanced penetration testing techniques, which include network reconnaissance, client-side attacks, wireless attacks, and targeted social-engineering attacks.
• Here, you will also learn to Integrate NeXpose, Nmap, and Nessus with Metasploit to automate discovery. 

You will learn plenty of hacking skills in this ethical hacking book.

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4. Penetration Testing: A Hands-On Introduction to Hacking 

Author: Georgia Weidman

• This cyber security book provides insight into penetration testing, which involves discovering security weaknesses in operating systems, networks, and applications. 
• This book focuses on the core skills and techniques a penetration tester requires. It will familiarize you with the prime stages of an actual assessment, which include gathering information, unraveling vulnerabilities, gaining access to networks, and so on. 
• In addition to the above, you will learn to crack passwords, bypass antivirus software, automate attacks, and use the Metasploit framework to launch exploits and write your Metasploit modules. 

5. The Hacker Playbook 3: Practical Guide To Penetration Testing

Author: Peter Kim

• This is the third iteration of the THP—The Hacker Playbook Series. It introduces new strategies, attacks, exploits, and tips and highlights a few techniques from previous versions. 
• The Hacker Playbook 3 - Red Team Edition acquaints you with the Red Team. Red Teams simulate real-world, advanced attacks to test your organization's defensive teams. 
• Reading this will help you advance your offensive hacking skills and attack paths. It also focuses on real-world attacks, exploitation, custom malware, persistence, and more. 

6. Practical Malware Analysis: The Hands-On Guide to Dissecting Malicious Software

Authors: Michael Sikorski, Andrew Honig

• Malware is malicious software that hackers often use to exploit system vulnerabilities. This book on Practical Malware Analysis teaches about the tools and techniques used by cyber security analysts. 
• This book will guide you to analyze, debug, and disassemble malicious software. 
• Here, you will also learn to set up a safe virtual environment to analyze malware, how to crack open malware, gauge the damage it has done, clean your network, and verify that the malware never comes back.

7. Social Engineering: The Science of Human Hacking

Author: Christopher Hadnagy

• Social engineering depends on human errors to gain access to confidential information. Systems can be protected, but we cannot use code that is certain to help protect data when it is a human being.  
• This book depicts the most commonly used social engineering methods and shows how they were used in the past. 
• Here, you will learn to examine common social engineering tricks, analyze how social engineers can use emotions, adopt fruitful countermeasures to prevent hacking, and more.

8. Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C

Authors: Bruce Schneier

• This cyber security book provides a comprehensive survey of modern cryptography. 
• It defines how professionals can use cryptography to encipher and decipher messages.
• It consists of several cryptography algorithms and shows how to solve security problems.

9. Black Hat Python: Python Programming for Hackers and Pentesters 

Author: Justin Seitz 

• Many exploit frameworks are written in Python; here, using GitHub, you will learn to create a trojan command-and-control, detect sandboxing, and automate common malware tasks.
• In this book, you'll learn about the darker side of Python's capabilities, such as infecting virtual machines, writing network sniffers, and creating stealthy trojans. 
• This book covers networking fundamentals, web applications, windows privilege escalation tricks, and more.

10. The Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws

Author: Dafydd Stuttard and Marcus Pinto 

• The second edition of this book focuses on updated Web applications, which expose them to attacks and enable fraudulent transactions. 
• It discusses the latest step-by-step methods for attacking and defending the extensive range of ever-evolving Web applications. It also discusses new remoting frameworks, HTML5, UI redress, and hybrid file attacks, to name a few.  
• In addition to the above, the other concepts are Attacking Authentication, Attacking the Application Server, and Finding Vulnerabilities in Source Code.

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11. Hacking: Computer Hacking, Security Testing, Penetration Testing, and Basic Security

Author: John Slavio

Hacking can be a real threat to anyone. Learning how to hack is the only way to protect yourself from hacking. This book contains all the basic principles of hacking and the intricate techniques and methods you can use to hack. It uses simple tech language that beginners can understand without leaving out any complex details required for hacking.

This ethical hacking book's language is simple enough for beginners to understand, yet it does not omit any of the intricate details necessary for engaging in computer hacking activities.

12. Computer Hacking Beginners Guide

Author: Alan T. Norman

This book is perfect for beginners learning how to make their first hack. It contains all the different techniques and tools used by both criminal and ethical hackers. You will learn how information security can be compromised and how to identify attacks in any system. You will also learn about spoofing techniques, WiFi hacking, and email hacking, along with lots of tips for ethical hacking. 

13. Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age

Author: Paul Graham

Using thoughtful prose and historical examples, Graham takes his readers on an exploration called "an intellectual Wild West," where he explains the technological world and the motivations of the people in it. You will learn about hackers, what motivates them to hack, and why you should care. There are so many other ideas discussed in this boo,k including the importance of beauty in software design, making wealth, free speech, the open-source movement, internet startups, the programming language renaissance, digital design, and lots more.

14. Advanced Penetration Testing: Hacking the World’s Most Secure Networks

Author: Wil Allsopp

This book is written by Wil Allsopp, a top security expert who has performed hacking and penetration testing for Fortune 100 companies worldwide. It contains many advanced hacking techniques for high-security environments. The book also provides a complex and highly realistic attack simulation using Kali Linux and Metasploit examples. Using harvested credentials, you will also learn how to infiltrate deep into operating systems and networks.

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15. The Hardware Hacker: Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware

Author: Andrew Bunnie Huang

The Hardware Hacker is a key resource for all aspiring hackers. It contains a collection of personal essays and interviews on topics such as the legality of reverse engineering, law, intellectual property practices between China and the United States, and more. It also contains highly detailed passages on manufacturing and provides a comprehensive take on the issues associated with open-source hardware.

16. BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner’s Guide

Author: Vivek Ramachandran

This book is written for beginners to easily grasp the concepts and techniques of wireless attacks. Every attack is described using rich illustrations and steps in the form of a lab exercise. This book assumes familiarity with Backtrack and basic wireless concepts. So, if you are an IT professional or a security consultant with some knowledge of Backtrack, then this book is for you. 

17. Gray Hat Hacking: The Ethical Hacker’s Handbook 

Authors: Allen Harper, Ryan Linn, Stephen Sims, Michael Baucom, Huascar Tejeda, Daniel Fernandez, Moses Frost

This book provides step-by-step instructions for fortifying computer networks using effective ethical hacking techniques. It features actionable planning and analysis methods for identifying a hacker’s devious weapons, skills, and tactics and combating them using field-tested remedies, testing labs, and case studies. You will get complete coverage of malware analysis, penetration testing, and reverse engineering techniques.

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18. Mastering Hacking (The Art of Information Gathering & Scanning)

Author: Harsh Bothra

This book provides a simplified approach to hacking aimed at both technical and non-technical readers. You will learn about the latest tools and techniques of the modern Penetration Testing Framework, discover vulnerabilities, patch vulnerabilities, and protect assets over the network. The book also includes in-depth, real-life applications of various hacking techniques and acts as a handbook for your concrete step in information security.

Those were the best cybersecurity books. 

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Conclusion

This article will give you an overview of the best cybersecurity books. There are more books out there that can help you with your learning journey in cybersecurity. You can also look at the Cyber Security Expert master’s program provided by Simplilearn; this will acquaint you with all the necessary skills to become a cybersecurity expert.

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