Recommended Books

Note: These recommendations are based on books that I’ve read. There are many other great books out there. If you’d like to make a recommendation fill out the contact form.

The Phoenix Project - This is a great book if you’re planning to work with development teams. It gives a better understanding of the DevOps side of the house from a story perspective. This can also lead to improving your own workflows and processes. I’ve applied the concepts from the book to application security, security engineering, and pentest teams with lots of success.

Threat Modeling: Designing for Security - This book goes over the activity of threat modeling. I started out using this with development teams but also found it useful for IT projects prior to them being kicked off. It helps account for security into the design of any project. I love that after the first chapter is says to just start doing threat modeling. Which is what I did.

Applied Network Security Monitoring - When I joined a SOC I wanted to dive more into log analysis. This book provided that. It helped me think of analysis as detective work and I’m looking to put all the pieces together. It also has hands on exercises using a tool called Security Onion. Which was valuable for learning how to ingest logs and perform analysis on them.

Spam Nation - This is a great book uncovering the underbelly of the spam and hacking scene written by infosec investigative report Brian Krebs. His blog is also a must read if you want to learn more about the criminal underground that uses the internet to take advantage of people.

Data Drive Security: Analysis, Visualization, and Dashboards - This a great book that covers using data to look for anomalies in SOC work and using data to improve security overall. Plus, it’s helped me identified what’s appalling visually from a metrics standpoint. It has exercises and very responsive authors to any questions or gotchas.