It’s soon time for Summer vacation to begin, and we’ve asked our colleagues to share some of their summer learning tips for better security awareness. Here’s a list of books, security e-learning courses, influencers and podcasts to deepen your knowledge in computer science, DevOps, and security awareness:
Gabriela Georgieva, Backend Developer
Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick
Probably the most well-known hacker of them all, Kevin Mitnick reveals how he hacked his way into data centers belonging to some of the world’s biggest companies. It’s a good starting point for anyone looking to get into hacking.
Web Hacking 101: How to Make Money Hacking Ethically by Peter Yaworski
The book comes straight from the ethical hacking/bug bounty community, with real-life examples that have been successfully used on the Fortune-500 and other names in the Silicon Valley.
Darknet Diaries Podcast
Darknet Diaries host, Jack Rhysider, is a talented storyteller and finds a way to feature exciting guests with action-filled stories. You’ll get a good mix of hacker stories, hacktivisim, web hacking tales, government cyber warfare, and more. It’s getting recognition with awards and mentions in major news publications and seems to do its part in raising security awareness outside of the security community.
Alfred Berg, Vulnerability Test Developer
The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
This book tells a story about a fictional poorly performing company and how the IT Manager, Bill, changes it. The book covers some likely struggles when getting DevOps up and running in the business. It also features a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) that blocks and breaks other teams and how he transforms.
Jamal Morris, Sales Engineer
The Complete Cyber Security Course : Hackers Exposed!
The title is a bit cheesy, but this Udemy course is a good starting point for getting into cybersecurity and becoming aware of common threats. It introduces you to hacking techniques, the current threat landscape and what you can do yourself to ensure you’re more secure.
rey.nbows on TikTok
She is a security and privacy advocate making TikTok videos about cybersecurity and hacking as well. I can recommend following her. Her content is for anyone who wants to improve their awareness about their activity online and show others how hacking can be fun in an unconventional way.
Johan Svensson, Backend Developer
Getting Things Done, David Allen
GTD, Getting Things Done, is a time management method that I’ve been using since 2008. Still, I didn’t actually read David Allen’s book until this year. The GTD process itself can be explained in five minutes, but Allen’s book goes into a lot more details and thought processes about optimizing your time to let you get things done, and reducing stress by keeping tasks out of your mind until you actually need to think about them. Extra relevant now in the age of smartphones that let us bring our productivity tools with us wherever we go.
Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
I first read this when it was published in 2018, and decided it was time for a re-read. This book provides plenty of arguments backed with solid research that DevOps is a force multiplier that increases delivery speed and provides scalable results in a growing tech organization. Highly recommended for managers and developers alike.
Black Hat Go: Go Programming for Hackers and Pentesters, Tom Steele, Chris Patten, and Dan Kottmann
This book explicitly states that it’s not there to teach you good software development practices. As a developer, I did raise a multitude of eyebrows at some of the code. Still, it does show off some useful tools and techniques for a penetration tester – how to write port scanners, HTTP proxies, DNS tunnels, fuzzers, and various other methods you can use to probe a target for vulnerabilities. As we like to say around here… go hack yourself!
Daniel Seid, ISO-Certification/Information Security Consultant
Neuromancer by William Gibson
A classic cyberpunk fiction read where a banished and washed-up computer hacker by the name of Henry Case is suddenly given another chance to fight an evil and powerful artificial intelligence.
Online course: Academy of Cyber Security
Nothing is permanent, neither knowledge nor business-organizations. Everything evolves or dies. In any organization, people come and leave. But a basic level of security understanding is each and everyone’s responsibility (besides the ordinary work-tasks). Everyone in an organization has their own personal responsibility to protect the information assets, without any exemptions. When it comes to security, it’s all hands on deck, or the ship might sink. There are many free resources to learn more about security online like the Academy of Cyber Security on Youtube, where you can get basic to advanced training such as a free CISSP boot camp course.
Jocelyn Chan, Content Manager
Hello World – Hannah Fry
When should you trust an algorithm vs. your human brain? This book gives you some good food for thought with examples of when to trust the machine over your own instinct and vice versa. Since I’m in marketing, this helped me understand the intimidating world of data and computer science a bit better!
Humans of Infosec Podcast
This podcast interviews humans working in Infosec (surprise!) and I think Caroline Wong (Cobalt’s Chief Strategy Officer) does a great job with finding guests with compelling stories and are positively impacted the security community. It covers a range of topics and I enjoy the talks relating to human psyche, managing security teams and building up positive security culture.
Undetected – a web security podcast by Detectify
Here comes my shameless plug for our own podcast – I’m in Marketing after all! We are ready to release the last two episodes of season 1 soon! In this podcast, we cover the different depths of security topics, from its humble beginnings, the lucrative bug bounty industry, current events, careers, and legalities. Join us here!
Looking for more? Check out this previous list of Detectify team’s 10 favourite security books.
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