Hacking is an art and even a challenging skill to master. If you want to hack into a system or a server, basically, you need to be more skilled and efficient than the creator of that server. And becoming an expert in this field requires a lot of effort and consistency. Whether you aim to become an ethical hacker or a black hat hacker, you must know all the concepts and programming skills to complete your work.
One question that every aspiring hacker has in mind is, what is the correct source for correct and effective knowledge to become successful in ethical hacking? The correct answer is to read and practice.
Although reading and learning through hacking books pdfmight seem too old-fashioned in this technologically advanced world, proper knowledge is only trapped in these bundles of pages. Online tutorials and YouTube videos can provide much information, but you can not ignore the power of a good book.
Hundreds of hacking books pdf are available to get you started in the domain. Here, we list a few of the best free ethical hacking books that can lead you from a basic beginner level to an advanced one. These best hack books online will surely be a good start for your journey.
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1. The RTFM: Red Team Field Manual
This book is one of the must-have best hacking books pdf if you are getting started with ethical hacking. Ben Clark is the writer of this book, and hence it’s trendy. It enlightens the reader with all the basic Windows and Linux concepts and commands and tips on Windows PowerShell and Python Scripts. Once you start reading this piece, you’ll be glued to it as it makes you curious to learn more and more about the wonders of computational programming. It’s a small size book and is available on Amazon/Flipkart at a very affordable rate.
2. The Web Application Hackers Handbook: Finding and exploiting security flaws
You must have heard about Burp Suite; it is one of the successful tools used for penetration testing. This hacking book is penned by the founder of the organisation that created this powerful tool. This book is specially curated for a person who is entirely new to hacking and computer science. The book’s content starts with fundamental information about the internet and leads you step-by-step through the hacking world. It will enable you to find various vulnerabilities, search for the weakest parts of an application and then attack the web applications. Through hacking techniques, it will also guide you to defend yourself from various attacks. It is a bundle of 21 chapters and is excellent for all beginners.
3. Hacking: The Art of Exploitation
The book, authored by Jon Erickson, is one of the premium free ethical hacking booksrecommended by most cybersecurity experts and hackers. Regarding the best hacking books free download, this one is a true classic. Although you might find it odd that it has not been updated since 2008 once you go through it, you will find that the content is valuable and relevant in today’s world also. It is a good blend of technique and theory which is essential to learn any modern-age tool for hacking. Chapters in this book will introduce you to basic to advanced-level programming, networking, exploitation, countermeasures as well as cryptology. It’s a good choice if you’re at an intermediate to advance level.
4. The Hackers Playbook 2
Next on our list is a classic book that gives you practical guidance instead of just theory. Peter Kim, the author of this hack book free, has written it uniquely. It is a step-by-step guide to getting practical experience in penetration testing. This book is best suitable for beginners as it will clear all your doubts and remove all the roadblocks you can find while performing penetration testing. The content of this book enables you to handle various network types, find vulnerabilities, and dodge antivirus software.
5. Practical Malware Analysis: The Hand’s on Guide To Dissecting Malicious Software
Next on the list is one of the most famous hacking books for beginners pdf in english that experts highly recommend. It’s a practical malware analysis. Authored by Michael Sikorski and Andrew Honig. It guides everyone who must manually search for malware in a windows system. It gives an idea about the overall Windows system and its working so aspiring hackers can get detailed information. If you are just getting started in this field it is one of the best hacking books pdf to learn from.
To bridge the gap between theory and practice, explore Ethical Hacking Course in Coimbatore incorporating the latest tools and techniques.
6. Kali Linux Revealed Mastering the Penetration Testing Distribution
Kali Linux might sound familiar to you if you are less or more interested in hacking. It is not recommended for beginners to go work on Kali Linux instantly. But if you plan to do so anyway, here is the best recommendation to learn the basics of Kali Linux, formerly known as Backtrack. It is one of the most popular distributions for penetration testing. The hack book free includes all the fundamentals and concepts of Linux and Kali Linux.
After reading Kali’s hacking books pdf, you can configure him and all different types of environments and devices like virtual, laptop, desktop, server, etc. It is one of the best hacking books for beginners pdf in english to learn about Kali Linux and can be used by advanced-level professionals to get an in-depth and practical approach to penetration testing in Kali Linux. Although there might be a case where you might find this hack book free doesn’t have good ratings on platforms like Amazon, the information provided in this book and the tools & techniques mentioned in this book will take you to another dimension of the hacking world.
7. Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as The World’s Most Wanted Hacker
You can argue that this is not a good fit for the category of best hack book free but we will recommend you to go for a read of this book as Kevin Mitnick authors it. He is a well-known hacker and was on the World’s most-wanted list of FBI for a long time. This book enlightens the reader about the story of the hacker who was most wanted in the prime time of his life between 1979 and 1995. But he was arrested by the FBI after being chased for several years. It is a very small hack book free & a fun read. The fact about Kevin is that he hacked his first computer when he was just a 16-year-old kid. He is an excellent hacker and it takes him only a few minutes to hack into phones, computer systems, and networks as well. This is one of hacking books for beginners pdf in english that gives an insight into how a hacker’s brain works and what motivates them to keep doing what they do. Rigorous learning is not useful. You should take on some fun reads as well, and hence, this book becomes a must-read for all aspiring hackers.
8. The Basics of Hacking and Penetration Testing
One of the most recommended hacking books pdf for beginners is the next on our list, this book will enlighten the readers with every basic that a newbie hacker needs to know. Through this book, you will be able to understand the workings and results of the recent applications that are used in hacking like Kali Linux, Metasploit, Social Engineering Toolkit, Google Reconnaissance, and many more. With the limelight of this hack book free, you will get a better understanding of the attacks on different types of security systems and clear guidance on performing penetration tests, and this knowledge will be helpful to you throughout your career. And hence, it’s a must-have.
9. Computer Hacking Beginners Guide: How to Hack Wireless Network Basic Security and Penetration Testing Kali Linux
Going forward with our list we have this excellent book, penned down by Alan T Norman. If you are interested in learning a detailed and proper methodology for Ethical hacking, this is the best among hacking books pdf you can refer to. It provides each step that is required to step into this fascinating world of hacking. By reading this hack book free, you will be able to learn all the methodologies of how hacking works so that you can apply them to hack and defend yourself from various hacking attacks. It informs you about counterhacks that you can use to save yourself from illegal hackers. It provides information about how to minimise the destruction if you have been a victim of a cyber-attack or even stop any ongoing attack.
10. Hacking: A beginner’s guide to Your First Computer Hack
The hack book freeby Kevin White is an essential guide that tells you how hacking works so that you can defend your computer from becoming the victim of the most general hacking attacks that are in trend. It will enable you to be a step ahead of any hacker so that you can save your system. It will also enhance your knowledge of how you can hack any system as well as how you can counter-hack the opponent. This all will be possible because it gives you detailed procedures and informs you about the tools used by ethical and unlawful hackers. To accelerate your learning curve, consider combining it with Ethical Hacking Course in Chennai that provides structured training and certifications.
11. CISSP: All-in-one Exam Guide
To become a successful ethical hacker and get certified in hacking you will need to have all the latest updates and information regarding the field of hacking. For various certification exams as well as IT security certification, you will need to know the tools that hackers are using in today’s world. This hack book free, written by Shon Harris, is your go-to guide for clearing certification exams, as it is completely updated with the newest additions in the field of hacking and IT Security. Especially if you are preparing for a CISSP hacking exam, it’s the best choice you can make. The content of this particular book among the rest of hacking books pdf is curated for studying for these exams only, as it contains a variety of questions, like MCQs, along with a descriptive explanation of all questions. It also has tips and tricks which may be very useful to crack different exams.
12. Nmap Network Scanning: The Official Nmap Project Guide to Network Discovery and Security Scanning
One of the fantastic books that we have in our best hacking books for beginners pdf in english collection is the Nmap Network Scanning. It is one of the most popular free hacking books that has benefited millions of users. The book’s syllabus covers network discovery, management, and security auditing in-depth and is a complete authoritative guide for the Nmap security scanner. Since it starts with fundamental information about port scanning, it’s the best hacking books pdf for beginners. It enhances knowledge regarding many real-world tasks and some procedures that you can implement immediately to solve issues like interference detection, optimising Nmap performance, subverting firewalls and many more automated networking tasks
13. Hash Crack: Password Cracking Manual
Hacking is incomplete without learning about various tips and tricks for password breaking. Just follow through this book if you want to learn how you can crack passwords. The hack book free gives the reader complete guidance on basic and high-level tips and techniques that various network security experts and penetration testers can use to evaluate the availability of an association from a password position. It also has various password-cracking tools and techniques. Inclusion overall information brochure that contains all the online sources, commands and tables that you can use to crack passwords and also used for protection against various password cracking attacks.
14. Black Hat Python: Python Programming for Hackers and Pentesters
The following recommendation on our list is a Python guide for hackers. Hacking is a special type of skill but generally, all hackers prefer to use conventional tools like Burp Suite to search for various vulnerabilities. Some professional hackers are quick enough to build their programs to hack a system by looking into its loopholes, and for this purpose, Python is the most effective language. Python is straightforward to learn, has a straightforward syntax, and is so powerful that you can create an excellent hacking system t within only a few lines of coem. For attaining the power of Python, this book by Justin Seitz is one of the highly recommended hacking books free download. This book is a complete guide that will lead you to create private trojans, infect virtual machines, and manipulate the packets on the network as well as it can teach you how to address various network sniffers. It also includes a steer you to use the Burp Suite web hacking toly.
15. Mastering Metasploit
We included this book because it is a complete tutorial of the famous Metasploit framework. It is the best hacking books for beginners pdf in english who want to learn about Metasploit. If you are a member of a security engineering team or a penetration tester and want to increase your testing skills and gain experience with Metasploit, then this hack book free is your go-to book. It furnishes a good understanding of exploitation and deeply teaches the reader about object-oriented languages.
To complement your book knowledge, consider enrolling in an Ethical Hacking Course in Bangalore to gain hands-on experience and practical skills.
16. Blue Team Handbook: Incident Response Edition
The Blue Team Handbook is also counted as one of the classic hacking books free download books in the field of hacking. Similar to the Red Team Manual, it is also one of the key books that will remain in this field forever because of its fantastic content. This particular hack book free is based on the incident process and provides a detailed description regarding the process of how attackers operate, along with different tools that are used for conflict response and proper methods used for network analysis. It will also guide you through the Windows and LINUX analysis process. Hence, we can say that this book is filled with practical techniques to handle conflicts. Therefore, it is a useful hack books online to read, whether it is investigating unusual traffic, monitoring a misbehaving server or just writing up case notes.
17. Gray Hat Hacking: The Ethical Hackers Handbook
The Grey Hat Hacking is a handbook for people who want to become professional ethical hackers. These hacking books free download are available in two parts. The first one has given an introduction to the laws which are essential to know if you want to become a pentester. The second part of the book is completely technical ant comprises chapters from network scanning to vulnerability exploitation and fingerprinting into shellcode writing. This particular book also has chapters that will enlighten the readers about buffer overflows, format string overflows, and heap overflows which are the very basic addressing fundamentals. In the end, there is a discussion about a less popular vulnerability exposure technique called ‘Fuzzing’ and reverse engineering. This hack book free also gives you insights into the essential commercial tools that pen testers use, such as Canvas and Core Impact.
18. Web Hacking 101: How to Make Money Hacking
The next book that we have in line is one of the excellent hacking books free download authored by the co-founders of HackerOne, Michiel Prins, and Jobert Abma. As per the name of the book, you must have guessed that it is a complete web hacking guide. The book guides you regarding all the ethical investigation processes for different types of security problems. However, such free ethical hacking books have a limitation as they are very professional. It has a complete website vulnerability detection chapter but doesn’t contribute much in real-world cases. The formation of the hack book free is a little bit different and it is composed of the weaknesses that are openly exposed. However, it will help you to illustrate the fundamental web vulnerabilities and will help you start your journey of searching for vulnerabilities and assembling gratuities.
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19. Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking
The next hack book free on our recommended list is a pretty old book. It was written by Christopher Hadnagy in the year 2010. This book is a complete guide to Social Engineering. Social engineering is a unique technique that depicts the art of hacking humans to get access to their passwords. This when compared to the other hacking books pdf will lead you through the process, from the beginning to how you can identify fraud and identity theft. It also has instances of various exploits where a person is deceived so that you can learn through it.
20. The Hackers Playbook 3
As you might have already guessed, the Hacker Playbook 3 is the successor of Hacker’s Playbook 2. All the information and detailed procedures are explained in the first two hacking books free download and this third version will give you good practical step-by-step guidance on how to perform penetration testing. In this hack book free, the author has explained each and every phase of a penetration test in detail. Starting from the very basics of how to set up the environment for pen-testing. As you go forward with this book, you will learn every step of a penetration test along with web application exploitation, social engineering techniques, compromising networks, and physical attacks. Since the author of these free hacking books, Peter Kim is an excellent teacher, it’s a very valuable addition to your collection of books to learn to hack. It will help to sharpen your skills.
21. Real-World Bug Hunting
Real-World Bug Hunting, penned down by Peter Yaworski, is a good read if you have basic information regarding the terms that are used in hacking. It’s a relatively new book as it was released in 2019 and hence is up to date with all the relevant information and current technology. The author of the hack book free himself is a security professional who is determined to engage more and more people with the fascinating world of hacking, and he is successful in doing so by the means of this book.
This unlike other free hacking books is very well structured and it provides a very detailed analysis of all the important terms from the world of hacking, like web application security as well as bug hunting. It also teaches the reader about web vulnerability types like Open Redirect, SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting, HTML Injection, Cross-Site Request Forgery, XEE, RCEs, IDORs, and many more. After all the valuable information, at the end of the book, you will find a section which is known as ‘finding your bug bounties’. This section of the hacking books pdf will make you aware of Reconnaissance over application testing and the process to automate testing
22. Advanced Penetration Testing: Hacking the World’s Most Secure Networks by Will Allsopp
So, the next book on our list is one of the best recommendations for advanced-level hackers and professionals. Although newbies can also go through this book, it is very unlikely that you will get everything written in it. As the name itself is advanced penetration testing, this hack book free will take you on a tour of very advanced penetration testing tools beyond Kali Linux.
His hacking books pdf not only introduces you to such amazing tools but also briefs you on how they work and teaches you to learn to write your own tools from the beginning until completion. If you complete the content of the book, you will have an edge over any other hacker who is just able to use the basic hacking toolkit. Also, in the end, it covers some parts of social engineering. It is a very informative and good hack book free, but it is recommended that only advanced people will be able to finish this one.
23. Honorable Mention: Hacking Mit Metasploit
Although this book is written in German, it is one of the finest books in the world of hacking. We know that everyone is not comfortable with the German language, but its content level doesn’t allow us to keep it aside. English translation of this book is not yet available, but we hope it reaches everyone soon.
The author of the free hacking books is Michael Messner and, in the book, he has mentioned every small point that hackers need to know about the Metasploit framework. And because of the great teaching methodology of the author, the reader gets to know every detail. If you can get it translated, this hack book free will prove that it was the best decision that you have made.
24. Hacking the Hackers: From the Experts Who Take Down Hackers
As you all smart people out there have already guessed by the name of the book, it is one of the best hacking books pdf on cybersecurity. Hacking the hacker means that the book will take you deep inside the hacker’s mind and explain how hackers work. So that you can be one step ahead of the hacker and save yourself and your organisation from harmful cyber-attacks. This hack book free will tell you how the hacker finds vulnerabilities so that you can find them yourself before the hacker and fix them so that the hacker is not able to crack your system.
It is one of the besthacking books free download that is recommended by the world’s best white hat hackers as well as the security researchers, many leaders, and writers, and hence this book is more of a type of book that helps us to keep our world secure.
25. Mastering Hacking: The Art of Information Gathering and Scanning
The last book on our recommendation list is a book written by an Indian author Harsh Bothra. Mastering Hacking is one of the best hacking books pdf books available online that will help you learn the details of the modern penetration testing framework. This book contains information about all the techniques of pen-testing and the process of discovering different types of vulnerabilities in systems, along with patching and more. The author’s aim in writing this book is to present the best practices and technologies in a very simplified manner. And because of this approach of the author no matter if the reader is from a technical or non-technical background, he or she will be able to master hacking.
26. The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws by Dafydd Stuttard and Marcus Pinto
Dafydd Stuttard and Marcus Pinto’s “The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook” is a cornerstone in the realm of web application security, often considered a must-read for aspiring hackers and penetration testers. The book acts as a guide to understanding and exploiting web application vulnerabilities, making it an valuable source for those interested in web hacking books pdf. This hack book free covers a wide range of topics, from fundamental web application concepts to advanced techniques for finding and exploiting security flaws.
Readers will gain insights into the hacker’s mindset, learning how to think like an attacker to identify potential vulnerabilities. This knowledge is crucial for both ethical hackers and security professionals who aim to protect web applications from cyber threats. While you might not find this book as one of the hacking books free download, the investment is well worth it for the depth of knowledge and practical guidance it offers.
27. The Art of Memory Forensics – Detecting Malware and Threats in Linux, Windows and Mac
“The Art of Memory Forensics” by [Author Name] delves into a specialized area of digital forensics and incident response: memory analysis. This book is essential for anyone interested in uncovering malware, rootkits, and other advanced threats that may hide in a system’s memory. While not as widely known as some other hacking books pdf, it provides a comprehensive understanding of memory forensics techniques and tools.
Readers will learn how to capture, analyze, and interpret memory dumps from Windows, Linux, and Mac systems. By understanding how malicious software operates in memory, you can develop effective strategies for detecting and removing threats. This hack book free is highly recommended for those seeking a deeper understanding of malware analysis and incident response.
28. Network Security Assessment: Know Your Network by Chris McNab
Chris McNab’s “Network Security Assessment: Know Your Network” is a foundational book for anyone involved in network security. It emphasizes the importance of understanding your network infrastructure as a prerequisite for effective security measures. While it may not delve into advanced hacking techniques, it provides a strong base for building a solid network security foundation.
This hack book freecovers network architecture, protocols, and security best practices. It also explores tools and techniques for assessing network vulnerabilities and risks. By gaining a better understanding of your network, you can identify potential weaknesses and implement countermeasures to protect against attacks. While you might find some free ethical hacking books that cover similar topics, this book offers a structured and comprehensive approach to network security assessment.
You know what they say, “A person can never regret reading a good hacking books pdf ”. And we have presented you with a superb list to read. Just go for your first read! If you really want tona know much about hacking or want to set up your career in this domain, you should start with the very basic. Believe it or not, a book will definitely give you more accurate information than any 10-minute YouTube video. Getting worthy information will make you more confident in your skills, and eventually, you will land a good job position.
Let us know what is your best read!
Furthermore, you can refer to the Best python books for beginners and python coding for beginners, intermediate and advanced learners.
