Evasion Engineering (Building Custom Red Team Tools for Modern Defenses)

Build offensive tools the defender hasn't catalogued. Then learn how they'd catch you.

Detection engineers have studied every public framework. They know Cobalt Strike's beacon patterns, Metasploit's shellcode signatures, and the behavioral fingerprints of every commodity implant. The moment a tool goes public, its days are numbered.

Evasion Engineering is for red teamers who can't afford to be predictable.

Built around Go and a rigorous software engineering approach, this book teaches you to develop custom payloads from requirements to deployment, not by copying public tooling, but by understanding what modern defenses target and building around it. You'll construct network enumerators, C2 infrastructure, lateral movement tools, obfuscated loaders, and covert exfiltration channels. Each chapter then flips the perspective: the same techniques, examined from the detection side.

Dennis Chow (GIAC Security Expert #288) and Michael LaSalvia bring 36 combined years operating inside Fortune 500 red team programs. Their three Rs framework treats payload development as an engineering discipline: robustness, reusability, reliability.

You'll learn to:

• Build enumeration tools that don't match known signatures
• Develop C2 channels with custom protocols that bypass network inspection
• Implement lateral movement via autonomous worm mechanics
• Create hybrid-packed payloads that defeat AV and EDR
• Exfiltrate data through covert channels under active monitoring
• Map every technique to its detection surface and validate your results

Covers Go 1.21.x and higher, and Python 3.x