Hakin9 currently boasts 3 editors for their main magazine: Ewelina Sołtysiak, Adrianna Piłat, and Zuzanna Gregorczuk. Presumably, at least one of these people would be a technical editor, or the magazine would employ additional people to handle technical editing, given the nature of the topics. It is critical when publishing technical articles to ensure they are not only understandable, but accurate.
In August, 2012, Hakin9 published a "Nmap guide" that included several articles about the popular nmap port scanning tool. This issue proves beyond any doubt that absolutely no technical editing is performed on their articles. One of the articles is titled "Nmap: The Internet Considered Harmful - DARPA Inference Cheking Kludge Scanning" and goes over the top with an absurd mash-up of technical jargon that makes no sense. No surprise, the article was a troll submission designed to mess with Hakin9, and it worked. The title alone should throw up warning flags to any technical editor, as the acronym that is used throughout the article is "DICKS". It is telling that the title spells 'Cheking' incorrectly, yet it wasn't caught by their editors.
In addition to the 3 editors of the magazine, the special Nmap guide claims it had a slew of beta testers and proofreaders, yet none of them could determine that lines such as "The 10th-percentile latency of NMAP, as a function of the popularity of IPv7" were completely made up. The editorial group for this issue:
Editor in Chief: Grzegorz Tabaka
grzegorz.tabaka@hakin9.org
Managing Editor: Ewelina Soltysiak
ewelina.soltysiak@hakin9.org
Editorial Advisory Board:
Rebecca Wynn, Matt Jonkman, Donald Iverson, Michael Munt, Gary S. Milefsky, Julian Evans, Aby Rao
Proofreaders: Michael Munt, Rebecca Wynn, Elliott Bujan, Bob Folden, Steve Hodge, Jonathan Edwards, Steven Atcheson, Robert Wood, Ewelina Soltysiak
Top Betatesters: Luther Blissett, Francisco Carreno Martinez, Griff Reid, Dan Dieterle, Elia Pinto
Special Thanks to the Beta testers and Proofreaders who helped us with this issue. Without their assistance there would not be a Hakin9 magazine.
Senior Consultant/Publisher: Pawel Marciniak
Hakin9 CEO Ewelina Soltysiak proudly sent a copy to the creator of Nmap, not realizing that they had been duped. Some other choice quotes from the article:
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.
NMAP requires root access in order to allow B-trees.
First, cyberneticists added 10 GB/s of Internet access to our network. Further, we removed a 7TB USB key from our highly- available cluster to consider our Xbox network. Furthermore, we reduced the effective tape drive throughput of our stochastic overlay network. Similarly, we tripled the effective floppy disk space of our Internet-2 overlay network.
Once the remote operating system has been identified, DICKS will trigger a remote pool overflow in the IP Stack of the kernel. A combination of ROP and pool heap spraying enables relatively good reliability.
While we know of no other studies on autonomous methodologies, several efforts have been made to analyze object-oriented languages. Similarly, Thomas and Raman suggested a scheme for refining autonomous theory, but did not fully realize the implications of digital-to-analog converters at the time [7, 12, 13]. Furthermore, we had our method in mind before Wilson published the recent seminal work on Lamport clocks. In general, NMAP outperformed all existing systems in this area [14-17]."
In addition to the techno-babble, the paper cites 27 references including "Towards the Synthesis of Vacuum Tubes" and "Decoupling 802.11 Mesh Networks From Hierarchical Databases in DNS". One has to wonder if Hakin9 has many paying readers left, or that they are so unfamiliar with technology themselves, that not a single one appears to have reported the article to them.
Shortly after the guide's release, Ewelina Soltysiak gave permission to Fyodor / nmap.org to post the article publicly. However, after the article was exposed as a joke, Hakin9 had a change of heart and sent a poorly worded takedown notice from Izabela Grotowska, "legal adviser". Hakin9 continues to publish the guide, sans the first article. Hakin9 has also released a statement regarding this, in which they limply reply that "it should not have been published but for some reasons, which we are currently investigating internally, it was published, causing, as we can see, many negative voices." They go on to hope that this "single error will not undermine the general perception of Hakin9 as a professional magazine". However, this is far from the first editing error.
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