Security Researchers Troll Hakin9 Magazine

2012-09-28

Fyodor

http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2012/q3/1050

Hahahaha, I just saw the guide.  The best article is the first one,
which Hakin9 apparently published without even reading.  And they told
me I could post it as a sample of their work.  Here it is:

http://nmap.org/misc/hakin9-nmap-ebook-ch1.pdf

The article is by some well-known researchers:

Jon Oberheide, Nico Waisman, Matthieu Suiche, Chris Valasek,
Yarochkin Fyodor, the Grugq and Jonathan Brossard, Mark Dowd

Maybe they were sick of Hakin9's constant
please-write-an-unpaid-article-for-us spam and decided to submit some
well-crafted gibberish in response.

Even the paper title is ridiculous:

Nmap: The Internet Considered Harmful - DARPA Inference Cheking Kludge Scanning

They clearly chose that title so just so they could refer to it as
DICKS throughout the paper.  There is even an ASCII penis in the
"sample output" section, but apparently none of this raised any flags
from Hakin9's "review board".

Plus it is full of text like:

"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]."

The figures are great too, including one charting "the 10th-percentile
latency of NMAP, as a function of popularity of IPv7".  They cite 27
reverences, including seminal journal articles like "Towards the
Synthesis of Vacuum Tubes" and "Decoupling 802.11 Mesh Networks From
Hierarchical Databases in DNS".

Bravo, Mark Dowd and crew, Bravo!

Cheers,
Fyodor

PS: I think the authors used this "Automatic CS Paper Generator" as a
    starting point: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/


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