[ISN] ISC2 official guide plagiarism

[InfoSec News]

---------- Forwarded message ----------

http://www.attackprevention.com/forum/comments.php?id=10

Posted Feb 12, 2006 - 01:55 PM:
Subject: Official (ISC)2 Guide is a fraud

I have been reviewing Official (ISC)^2 Guide to the CISSP Exam [1]",
Susan Hansche/John Berti/Chris Hare, for one my classes and noticed it
has widespread plagiarism and what appear to be copyright violations,
including materials at the following verbatim
http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/cpsc/cryptography/vigenere.html

In the text, at page 406, "One of the main problems with simple
substitution ciphers is that they are so vulnerable to frequency
analysis..."

It also contains an exact copy of a copyrighted whitepaper (without reference 
or citation) from, of all things, the American Bar Association, at the 
following link: http://www.abanet.org/scitech/ec/isc/dsg-tutorial.html

Just as an example, the entire chapter on key management is a copy and
paste of that paper. At page 429 of the textbook, Public Key
Certificates and Certificate Authorities, compared to this publication
by the paper from American Bar Association under Public Key
Certificates, these are word-for-word. Indeed the entire chapter on
ciphers appears to be stolen off of the WWW.

Given that this book is on information security with an entire chapter
on ethics, I think this a travesty. I have notified the publisher of
this and they are investigating. I thought you might be interested as
well. mad

_____________________
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Michael Workman, Ph.D.
College of Information
Florida State University

[1] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/084931707X/c4iorg