About the Book
C++ for Ethical Blackhat Hackers is a hands-on, lab-safe guide to building defensive-grade offensive tooling. You'll write modern C++ (C++20/23 where helpful), wire in telemetry from the start, and validate detections with repeatable purple-team workflows. Every chapter converts techniques into measurable blue wins-from structured logging and OTEL traces to ETW/eBPF visibility and egress controls.
Written with a defense-first ethos: consent, legal boundaries, safe data, and reproducible labs.
Uses real, working code (CMake, Asio, OpenSSL, libbpf, ETW consumers) and production-grade practices (sanitizers, fuzzing, SBOM/signing).
Maps behaviors to MITRE ATT&CK, ships starter detections, and shows how to measure MTTD/FPR-so improvements are provable, not theoretical.
About the Technology
C++ remains the language of choice for high-performance, low-level, cross-platform tooling. This book leans on C++20 features (ranges, spans, coroutines where useful), RAII + std:: expected for safe resource handling, Asio for scalable I/O, and OpenTelemetry for portable telemetry. On Windows you'll work with ETW and AppLocker/WDAC; on Linux with eBPF, AppArmor/SELinux, and systemd sandboxing. What's Inside
Modern C++ setup: CMake + vcpkg/Conan, reproducible builds, sanitizers & fuzzing.
Secure coding patterns: spans, RAII, error models, secret handling, path safety.
OS & network fundamentals: processes, tokens, registry; /proc, capabilities, namespaces; sockets, DNS/HTTP(S).
Telemetry foundation: structured logging schema, OTLP exporters, metrics & traces, ingest pipelines (Elastic/Splunk-friendly).
Windows eventing: ETW providers/sessions, mapping to ATT&CK, common pitfalls, lab exercises.
Linux visibility: eBPF probes (exec/file/socket), ring buffers, sampling, query patterns.
Recon & initial access simulators (benign): host/service discovery, safe banner grabs, JSON telemetry.
Lateral & persistence simulators: Windows SCM/scheduled tasks; Linux systemd units/sockets-non-destructive and fully cleaned up.
Collection & exfil emulation (safe): synthetic NDJSON, chunked HTTP, stable TLS/JA3 profiles, proxy/DNS/egress controls.
Detection & hardening: ship Sigma/ESQL/Splunk queries, AppLocker/WDAC, AppArmor/SELinux, Santa (macOS).
Purple-team loop: plan → exercise → validate → iterate + a capstone chaining recon → lateral sim → exfil emu.
Who This Book Is For
Blue teamers & DFIR who want to understand tool signals and write durable detections.
Security engineers & purple teams measuring control efficacy with repeatable labs.
Developers building safe, observable C++ tooling for security programs or research.
Educators & students needing concrete, legally-sound exercises with measurable outcomes.
Threats evolve; your detections and policies must evolve faster. Every week without a measurable lab loop is a week of unknown blind spots. This book gives you a complete, ready-to-run framework so you can ship improvements this quarter, not "someday." Start now. Set up the lab, run the capstone, and turn your tools into defender wins. Install the toolchain, paste in the detections, and measure your first MTTD today. Your attack surface won't wait-your improvements shouldn't either.
