this:

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.”

…

(the quotes get better)

and this:

Uh-oh, it seems that Hakin9 had a change of heart. At first they were very proud to show off their DICKS (DARPA Inference Checking Kludge Scanning) article. When I asked if I could post it, they replied:

“Sure! You can post whichever article you’d like. Will you be posting that on your main page?”

I guess they expected the security community to be impressed by their DICKS, but instead they faced scorn and ridicule. Now they’re so embarrassed by everyone mocking their DICKS that they had their lawyer send me this removal demand:

and this this PDF before it’s gone.