Brian Baskin's Site (FWIW)

Last Updated on Monday, 26 October 2009 05:59 Written by Administrator Sunday, 25 October 2009 15:50

An incident came to light this last week, when the new book Dissecting the Hack: The F0rb1dd3n Network was reviewed by Wesley McGew, wherein many occurrences of plagiarism were found. The issue went public very quickly, and the lead authors came out in defense of their work.  The issue arose in the technical reference portion of the book. To help complete the book, the lead authors, Jayson Street and Kent Nabors, allowed the technical editor, Dustin L. Fritz, to write the large technical portion.  It was this technical portion, written by Dustin, that contained the plagiarism.  I was shocked.  I've met Dustin, and even had dinner with him and his wife and others at TechnoSecurity this year. I met him through my personal friend, Marcus Carey, who brings together many experts in the Baltimore/DC area through his DojoSec meetings. I just wouldn't expect the great cardinal sin of technical writing to be performed by him on this project.

The end result is that the credibility of two great people in the InfoSec world has been tarnished over a labor of love that they've been working on for years. But, that can be fixed.

It's a bad situation, but it is being rectified.  Syngress, the book's publisher, has come out with their official statement and is working to correct the situation. Dustin L. Fritz will no longer be working on any Syngress project.  The cache of copies of the book will be destroyed and a new ISBN created.  The technical volume will be completely eradicated and redone with a group effort. The details are still being worked out, but Marcus Carey will be leading the charge to interview the authors of the tools and methodologies used in the book.  I will be the technical editor on this portion to ensure that it is relevant, accurate, and fresh material.

You can review the latest happenings with this book project at its dedicated community site.

I'll do whatever I can to help make this book the best it can be.  How?  Well, here are some of my credentials. In my day job, I'm the Deputy Technical Lead for the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center's Training Academy (DC3 DCITA).  I spend much of my time overseeing various research projects into incident response, forensic analysis, and network intrusions.  I am part of the review cycle on over two dozen technical reference guides on cyber crime that our organization produces for its training courses.  The issue of plagiarism has come up before.  I've seen blocks of text: paragraphs or even page-long blocks, uncited and copied from other sites.  If you know how to find it, it's actually very easy to see.  We've been able to see these issues and stop them before they ever make it into the book, and provide additional training to the developer that made the mistake (which, many times, are purely by accident). I've been writing forensic technical manuals for nearly ten years, so I'm pretty good at what I do.

I've also authored and co-authored five books with Syngress. One of the chapters I wrote was republished into a best-of book, so I claim six books :)  Book authoring is a very difficult and time-consuming job.  For most of the books I've worked on, I was brought in by Syngress as "the closer". If a book was getting behind on its schedule, and a chapter needed to be done quickly to get it back on schedule, I would be brought in.  I wrote the three chapters of my first book, Securing IM and P2P Application in the Enterprise in a month. The third chapter was written in a 24-hour period of no sleep. It was also an eye-opening chapter, as I originally wasn't planned to do it. Instead, someone else wrote it and the technical editor (Marcus Sachs) found material in the chapter plagiarized from his own works. Since Syngress caught it early, the original author was stricken from the contract and I re-wrote that chapter.

Syngress has a great niche in the service they offer. The Information Security field is filled with really bright individuals that need an outlet to let their genius flow. Syngress provides this. With their new staff of editors, including Angelina Ward and Rachael, they have my full faith in making the best of this situation.