Articles : Phrack Magazine

Phrack magazine, published electronically, is the equivalent of a popular trade magazine geared towards computer hackers. Described by Fyodor - the Nmap creator - as “the best, and by far the longest running hacker zine,” Later shut down and then resurrected, Phrack editors decide which submissions should be published. Although number 63 was supposed to be its last issue, Phrack 69 was released in May 2016.

Phrack, first released on November 17, 1985, takes its name from the words “phreak” and “hack”. The founding editors of the magazine, known by the pseudonyms “Taran King” and “Knight Lightning”, edited most of the first 30 editions.

I was mainly introduced to this ezine by Liveoverflow youtube video where he dives into the history of the “Script Kiddie” term :

Notable Articles

• The Art of Port Scanning (Volume 7, Issue 51 01/09/97): Nmap was first released as a simple port scanner via an article in issue 51 of Phrack magazine which included the source code.
• Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit (Volume 7, Issue 49 08/11/96): “classic paper” on stack buffer overflows, partly responsible for popularizing the vulnerability.

• NT Web Technology Vulnerabilities (Volume 8, Issue 54 Dec 25th, 1998): First documentation of SQLi by Jeff Forristal aka rain.forest.puppy.
• VM escape - QEMU Case Study (Paper published on April 28.2017): Published by the Tunisian security researcher Mahdi Talbi and Paul Fariello implementing several CVEs (memory-leak vulnerability and heap-based exploitation) to escape Qemu virtualizer.