This is my review of Adversarial Tradectaft in Cybersecurity: Offense versus defense in real-time computer conflict by Dan Borges.
I was excited when I heard that Dan was writing a book. I have played in several games alongside him and really enjoy working with him each time. I also make heavy use of gscript when I play these kinds of CTFs, which he was a co-author of. As soon as I saw it on sale on Amazon, I pre-ordered it.
This book explains its intent pretty well in the preface:
“This book is designed to give competitor in various infosec attack and defend competitions a serious advantage”
Having played in team captain roles in the past, I was excited to see how my approaches to playing compared. This book presents a solid baseline of tools, techniques, procedures, and strategies that I feel every CTF player should know if they want to be competitive. I am going to recommend this book to all new players who wish to ramp up their CTF knowledge quickly.
The author expects that the reader has an intermediate level of knowledge with cybersecurity, but the material is presented in simple, easy to understand language. You can probably get by as a beginner, but will likely have to Google a lot of things as you read. I think if you are comfortable with working with virtual machines, installing software, and have a modest amount of lab work under your belt, you will be able to make sense of this material.
I was able to read this quickly in one evening. It is 216 pages long and has 8 chapters. I was already familiar with a lot of the concepts and tooling presented in this book due to previous experience. My familiarity with the material and the fact that there are no exercises, assignments, or labs to work through in this book contributed to the speed in which I was able to work through it.
Although there are no official exercises presented in this book, the reader is encouraged to explore the material on their own. The code examples presented in this book can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Adversarial-Tradecraft-in-Cybersecurity
Overall, I enjoyed reading this book. I do wish that there was more code provided, but I am also a nerd who enjoys messing with code.