Voice of Grey Hat (VoGH) / voiceofgreyhat.com - Extensive Plagiarism from Legitimate News Sources

Mon May 14 22:00:22 CDT 2012

[Update: After publishing this article, an admin from VoGH (presumably Avik Sarkar) emailed us with vague threats. In addition, @TeamGreyHat on Twitter quickly took offense to the article and threatened to hack and deface us after a string of juvenile threats.]

Voice of Grey Hat is yet another hacker / security news aggregation site. Like other sites, they appear to take a big shortcut in the path to journalism. Rather than writing their own stories and providing proper attribution, the articles borrow unedited text heavily from the original source. The only acknowledgement is in the form of a disclaimer that says "The news provided by us on this site is gathered from various Re-Sources." Of course, "gathered" is a bit vague, but an aggregation site should make it abundantly clear where the original article comes from. Instead, we get "Posted by VOGH Reporter" and no link to the original source. Based on the "about us" page, the VOGH Reporter is likely Avik Sarkar.

In addition to plagiarism and copyright infringement, Voice of Grey Hat also has an odd notion that all of their content is protected by the Digitial Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Despite the domain showing registration to an Australian address and Avik Sarkar living in Calcutta, India, they choose to proudly show a link to a DMCA warning for each article.

The Plagiarism

The following table details a brief sampling of articles examined for plagiarism and copyright infringement, without proper source attribution. Both the Voice of Grey Hat and original article are provided, along with the date each was published and a rough estimate of material copied based on the comparison by a third-party tool. Most articles consist of some original content, written by "VOGH Reporter", along with some material that is verbatim from the original source. This is willful infringement of copyright and inexcusable plagiarism.