Reconnaissance Tactics Forensics Specialist (RTF|S): A Tactical Field Guide for Security Professionals

CERTIFICATIONS PROVE KNOWLEDGE. FIELDWORK BUILDS CAPABILITY. AI NOW CHANGES BOTH.

RTF|S is the one-of-a-kind official technical field guide for security professionals who have passed the certifications and now want to become world-class operators. It is not another exam-prep book. It is 410 pages of commands, tools, scripts, workflows, and field methods that take you from exam readiness to operational confidence.

Written by a cybersecurity and digital forensics specialist with over 30 years of real engagement experience, this book covers the full practitioner lifecycle across five integrated domains: reconnaissance that maps a target, tactics that exploit what you find, forensics that reconstructs what happened, operational security that keeps you invisible, and reporting that turns findings into business impact.

Every technique is explained at depth. Every tool is shown the way operators actually use it, not the way beginners do. And the book ships with 49 production-ready scripts in Python, Bash, and PowerShell, so you are not just reading theory, you are building capability.

INSIDE YOU WILL FIND:

• Practical reconnaissance, enumeration, and service-discovery workflows with real Nmap and NSE syntax

• SMB, Active Directory, Linux, web, database, and cloud assessment methods

• Exploitation and post-exploitation workflows, including privilege escalation and credential attacks

• Digital forensics: memory analysis, disk and file-system forensics, log analysis, and network forensics

• Operational security and artifact cleanup across Windows and Linux

• AI-assisted security workflows using ChatGPT, Claude, Ollama, and LLaMA

• Testing of modern AI systems: prompt injection, data leakage, MCP security, and agent abuse

• Adversarial testing with Garak, PyRIT, PromptBench, and the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications

• Building your own custom toolkit, so you never depend entirely on commercial tools

• Reporting templates, field notes, analyst tips, and repeatable procedures

THIS BOOK IS FOR:

Penetration testers, red teamers, forensics investigators, and security engineers moving beyond CEH, CHFI, ECIH, CPENT, CISSP, CISA, CISM, and OSCP. If you are comfortable at the command line and want the depth that separates practitioners from specialists, this book was written for you.

18 chapters. 5 parts. 410 pages. 49 scripts. Hands-on labs. Real-world examples drawn from decades of consulting, testing, and investigation.

Companion labs, scripts, and resources are available at OBISEC.COM.

Beyond certifications. Into tactical practice.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dimitrios Zacharopoulos is not only an accomplished writer of fiction, Dimitrios is also a cybersecurity and digital forensics specialist with 40 years in IT and 36 years in cyber security. He holds CISSP, OSCP, CEH, and CHFI among numerous certifications, and has spent decades delivering security consulting, penetration testing, forensic investigation, and advanced technical training to professionals across government, finance, defence, telecoms, law enforcement, and enterprise. RTFS distils that experience into a single, field-ready reference.