The Unrevealed Secrets of Hacking and Cracking; Hack Before You Get Cracked - 73.7% Plagiarized

Sat Feb 16 15:27:14 CST 2013

By Prateek Shukla & Navneet Mehra

ISBN: 978-81-7806-326-3

Publisher: Unicorn Books

The book "The Unrevealed Secrets of Hacking and Cracking; Hack Before You Get Cracked" was 'written' by Prateek Shukla (prateek2654@gmail.com) and Navneet Mehra (hackers_beware@yahoo.in). According to one article, Mehra has written four other books, which have not been reviewed by attrition.org, and contributed to this one. Via an email conversation, Shukla told us that he wrote most of this book, and Navneet only wrote three chapters (Introduction, Securing Wireless Network, Security for an Organization). Before going into the review, we wanted to point out a few things that bring more clarity to the author's intentions and understanding of writing.

The book begins with acknowledgements that include:

We would like to specially thank Mrs. Sophia Mitra, Mrs. Patralekha Ghosh, Mrs. Suparna Das and Mr. Bunny for being supportive to us and believing in our writing capabilities since a long time. Without valuable inputs from Unicorn Books and the editorial team, this manuscript would not have taken the shape of a book.

Specifically note that all those people "believed in their writing capabilities" when you read the email thread between Prateek Shukla and Jericho, where he attempts to explain the plagiarism.

The Plagiarism

The following table details the portions of the book that were taken from other sources. A full review was not performed due to the amount of plagiarism found by the halway point. Note that we also reviewed the two technical chapters written by Mehra to determine if the plagiarism was limited to one author, and it was not. Information is included to distinguish not only plagiarized material, but also what was done in an attempt to obscure the original source (e.g., removing text or credit). This shows willful infringement of copyright and inexcusable plagiarism.

The percentage calculated is based on the material reviewed, and then projected for the other half of the book. While the second half was largely left alone, there is no reason to suspect that the frequency of plagiarism changed.