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Re: Hakin9's new Nmap Guide (seclists.org)
136 points by dewey on Sept 28, 2012 | hide | past | favorite | 22 comments



It looks like Jonathan Brossard was the author: https://twitter.com/jonoberheide/status/251902357720403971

I doubt this is widely known on Hacker News, but Hakin9 is one of the most spammy organizations in infosec. They constantly beg everyone with any relationship to security online to write articles for them and it seems impossible to get them to stop. The creation of this epic troll was likely a direct response to that.

The articles they do get tend to be more centered around using and running tools, which isn't that useful and doesn't help you grow, and are filled with typos and errors. I wouldn't be surprised if there were also egregious examples of plagiarism hidden in their magazine like what was discovered at the Infosec Institute (http://attrition.org/errata/plagiarism/infosec_institute/).


Actually, @fygrave put together the document (using scigen and a draft from jonathan), so both of them should get credit.


I have dealt with Hakin9 a few years ago and was extremely disappointed by how they handle themselves. After publishing my article (a piece about overwriting system calls by rewriting pointers in the system_table and practical uses) it took them close to 10 months to be paid and only did so after harassing them for months.

Its hilarious, albeit not too surprising, that they published this without even bothering to read it (they crowdsource their proof reading and expect beta readers to report if they are about to publish something inaccurate or outright stupid).


Quite an old tool, but SciGen ( http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ ) is great for generating this style of satirical paper using choice buzzwords.

SciGen has famously been used to get falsified publications into several "real" journals - citations are available on the SciGen page linked above and worth checking out.


Hello everyone,

My name is Ewa Dudzic, I have been the chief editor of Hakin9 for the last 15 years. I would like to make a statement concerning the article which you are mentioning in this post. First of all I would like sincerely apologize to everyone of you and all our readers for what has happened. I have to admit that it was the unintentional mistake on our part. It should not have been published but for some reasons, which we are currently investigating internally, it was published causing as I can see a lot of negative opinions. Mentioning that I would like to thank you for all your reactions. As negative as they sound I humbly accept them and take full responsibility for that mistake on our part. I can only wish that this hopefully one-time error will not undermine the general perception of Hakin9 as professional magazine offering the highest standard possible. I would also like to kindly ask you not to pass the judgment on authors collaborating with us (who devote their professionalism and heart to the content of each issue) basing on this example. I can assure you we will investigate the matter to prevent such "accidents" in the future. If you have any other questions or comments please do not hesitate to contact me via email: ewa.dudzic@hakin9.org


No idea if that is actually Ewa Dudzic, but this post is similar to past responses to previous hakin9 spam. All useless in stopping them. She also appears to no longer be listed as their chief editor on their website.

Also - hakin9 has only been around for 7 years, not 15. Sigh.


Hakin9 as professional magazine ... well, you have to know somethin, a donkey will never be a stallion :)


"...pushing CPU microcode updates to the Windows 8 kernel..."

"...we asked (and answered) what would happen if mutually noisy flip-flop gates were used instead of virtual machines..."

"...J. P. Ito’s seminal treatise on suffix trees and observed effective USB key space..."

Lovely. They've been SocialTexted!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair


Outstanding. My personal favourite is,

"Our experiments soon proved that exokernelizing our fuzzy Knesis keyboards was more effective than making autonomous them, as previous work suggested. Our experiments soon proved that microkernelizing our PDP 11s was more effective than exokernelizing them, as previous work suggested. We note that other researchers have tried and failed to enable this functionality."


Is this SCIgen? It looks like the same style, and "exokernel" vaguely identifies it as the right co-conspirators. :-)


As I understand it, it was a SciGen paper that was enhanced to make it more readable.


Pretty funny - found this one that made me laugh:

"Despite the results by Qian et al., we can disconfirm that the much-touted real-time algorithm for the improvement of the transistor runs in Ω(2n) time. This may or may not actually hold in reality. Along these same lines, the frame- work for NMAP consists of four independent components: wireless methodologies, voice- over-IP, the appropriate unification of systems and Byzantine fault tolerance, and robust theory. This seems to hold in most cases. Therefore, the framework that our application uses is solidly grounded in reality."


"The rest of this paper is organized as follows. First, we motivate the need for A* search. Second, we place our work in context with the previous work in this area. As a result, we conclude."


The "Rogue MD5 signing" value of d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e is the MD5 of the empty string.


Trying to read some of that 'paper' was really funny. Definitely worth a look.


I routinely get spammed by Pentest Magazine affiliates asking me to write for them, was thinking about doing something similar but these guys beat me to it. Well played!


This is awesome.

Anyone have a link to this?

There is even an ASCII penis in the "sample output" section, but apparently none of this raised any flags from Hakin9's "review board".


It's in the output of DICKS:

  |--[ Exploiting remote IP stack pool overflow:
  | Anti ROP kernel heap non exec stack payload bypass
  |8======================================================> ((


Hum ...? or did they?(got punked!) i am starting to believe on negative viral campaigns


Hilarous. Great job, writing team, now I want to buy this magazine.


hackin9 got punk'd!!! Get down guys!


absolutely brilliant




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