Recommended Books for Beginners to Learn Ethical Hacking

In this article, I’m attempting to raise your curiosity to learn ethical hacking so that you can get the basic idea of Computer Underground. These books are hand picked and by no means a complete list of all the hacking books you need to master the art of ethical hacking:

TLDR; If you want to jump right into it go ahead the list is all yours:

Violent Python – If you are familiar with python start with it!
Web Hacking 101 – One of my favorite! Contains lots of Case Study
The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook – Start with it if you are starting from scratch!
The Hacker’s Playbook 3 – Lots of scripts, tools, and useful hacks
The tangled Web – See for yourself 😉

What is Ethical Hacking anyway?

Are you familiar with the term ‘Hacking‘ ? It means gaining unauthorized access to data. I will try to give you a simple example:

Suppose you are Alice. You have a personal diary where you keep all of your secrets. While you were sleeping someone named Bob read all your secrets without your permission. So, if we consider this unauthorized access of your personal data i.e. hacking into your diary then you are the victim and bob is the hacker.

Now, to protect yourself from such unauthorized access lets say you bought a treasure chest and kept your diary inside that treasure chest locked with a secret key.

And, this time you wanted to make sure no one can break into it. So, you asked Tim the Pirate who is an expert of treasure chest to check if your treasure chest is breakable or not. Whether is it possible to read the whole diary by peeping through the key hole or not etc!

With your permission, Tim started to try unlocking it with different keys notice that, both Tim and Bob by all means tried to read/access Alice’s Diary. However, the only difference is Tim has permission to do so But, Bob didn’t have it. What Tim is doing is actually helping Alice to keep her secrets more secure by finding the weakness and exposing it! This can be called ‘Ethical Hacking‘

The Purpose of Ethical hacking is to locate and expose the security vulnerability of a system

In the above story, which character did you like? Isn’t ‘Tim the pirate’ is the coolest? Are you willing to help others like Tim? If so, just scroll up! I have provided a list of books that you can begin with! Study them and, enjoy your journey!

The books mentioned above contain tons of contents related to hacking. Important thing is using those contents you will know how to hack however it will always be your choice whether to be a “Bob” or “Tim” i.e. whether you use your knowledge for harming others or to help others to protect themselves from Bob.

And, remember what Uncle Ben said: