The darkened skies call for some light summer reading, so why not consider something from the hacker side? We consider building sophisticated defenses in our scientific and professional settings, and even consider building artificial intelligence models to perform these hacking attacks. So what does it really mean to develop and use offensive security tools with a particular goal in mind? Welcome to the red team (vs the blue team) in the security setting (nonono, not the US-centric red/blue controversy, this is pure engineering we are talking about.) Being on the red team means trying the "fun" stuff, the actual hacking, as in the real offensive techniques and tools. The blue team is the set of network/host defenders, often equally equipped with their own techniques and tools. It is said that hacking is a creative and novel way to use technology, almost an art form, and sometimes surprising the spectators (and the actors themselves).

In this recently published book "Red Team Engineering," Casey Erdmann takes the reader into the hacking world, conveying basic concepts of hacking while illustrating these concepts with real-world, actionable software frameworks and infrastructures. He labels these as Offensive Security Tools (OSTs). The book is structured in three parts, for a total of 12 chapters, rounded off with an introduction and additional resources at the end. The book is illustrated with screenshots, snippets of code, configuration settings, and log files. All in black and white, not counting the reddish front and back cover.

The book is well structured, providing an introduction and 'Chapter 0' to prime the less seasoned readers. This is by no means an "introductory" book, as it quickly goes into a deep dive for the relevant subjects. This book assumes you know how to program and provides you with the higher level view of the goal to be achieved, while organizing the other components of the read team exercise or engagement. It also differentiates between a simple penetration testing exercise and a more complex red team engagement, with higher sophistication and different goals for red teams.

Part I 'Offensive Tool Development' is split into three chapters and focuses on exactly that: software development in support of red teaming. Part II 'Offensive Security Engineering' has four chapters that describe the infrastructure part of a red team engagement, such as command-and-control (C2) servers and other support frameworks. Part III 'Offensive Security in the Real World' wraps up with four real-world integration of the concepts described in Parts I and II.

In the three chapters in Part I, Chapter 1 'Web Authentication Exploits,' Chapter 2 'Authentication Attacks,' and Chapter 3 'Custom Malware Development and Distribution,' the reader gets to train their various aspects of software development, from JavaScript/SQL/Python for phishing websites, to tools to inspect network traffic as well as brute-forcing and password-spraying for discovering user credentials, and eventually build an actual ransomware tool in Go, encryption/decryption included. As previously mentioned, the reader gets to step through this with visuals, code snippets, and steps to get to each goal. It should be mentioned that the software and operation systems in use here in this book are Ubuntu 22.04 and contemporaries, so the reader is warned that while they are learning this in a particular setting (not too dated), the reader should have the mental flexibility of transferring this acquired knowledge to operation systems more attuned to 2026, especially since targeted systems aren't always running the latest and greatest...

In the four chapters in Part II, Chapter 4 'Automating Offensive Security Infrastructure Deployment,' Chapter 5 'Applying Network Fundamentals to C2 Implementation,' Chapter 6 'Reverse VPN Tunneling,' and Chapter 7 'Managing Infrastructure for Offensive Security Operations,' the reader learns about the actual infrastructure needed to be play naughty inside or outside with the other "kidz" in the sandbox. These are your logistics for transport, distribution, and bypassing network restrictions to make the red teaming operations successful. Knowing to program is one thing, but for this kind of activity, one needs to be able to stitch the components together at the network level. And that is where this set of chapters steps in: configuration management and infrastructure frameworks (such as Terraform) and tools typically used for system administration get repurposed for "nefarious" red team goals.

The last part, Part III, has again four chapters. Rather than focusing on fundamentals, this part of the book explores the actual stitching together of the aforementioned techniques in a set of four scenarios, one in each chapter. Chapter 8 looks at 'Exploitation with Metasploit' (which is already a framework), Chapter 9 describes 'Deploying a Dropbox' (for hiding/stashing software or other goods), Chapter 10 revisits the phishing ideas from Chapter 1 in 'Phishing Attack with C2 Redirectors,' and finally Chapter 11 uses online gaming terms to illustrate multi-member coordinated red team activity in 'Multiplayer C2 Configuration, mimicking hackers working together rather than a lone hacker riding into the virtual sunset. Overall it is a very hands-on book aimed at the practitioner or professional security worker, but it can certainly inspire academics alike who wish to go down the path of DefCon or BlackHat-style exploration. Those two conferences are known for hacking exploits and hands-on demonstration of breaches and interesting hacking techniques. While the initial software and operating system setup is a bit dated as mentioned above, there are already references to using artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT as helpers (e.g. for phishing) in these red teaming engineering efforts, making the transition to the modern world complete.

Casey Erdmann has done a great job at assembling a selection of offensive security tools (and projects) to make the young hacker apprentices salivate. I enjoyed reading this book very much, as it will be an inspiration for many readers. This book will find its place on my bookshelf for now, definitely within a short reach.

Sven Dietrich reviews technology and security books for IEEE Cipher. He welcomes your thoughts at spock at ieee dot org.