4 min read
May 24, 2020

Certified Unethical Hacker - Plagiarism Doesn't Pay

Certified Unethical Hacker - Plagiarism Doesn't Pay

This blog is hosted on a server that I control and I check the logs pretty regularly to make sure things are on the up and up. While checking logs yesterday, I noticed a spike of referrals from a website I didn't recognize so I checked it out:

Looks pretty innocuous right? I clicked on his Obscurity writeup and instantly recognized images and word-for-word plagiarism from my writeups. I did some investigation and found he ripped off other people as well for at least four writeups - Obscurity, OpenAdmin, Traverxec and Mango.

Obscurity

This is lifted straight from my writeup:

My writeup:

Here's more plagiarism from Manish Bhardwaj:

My writeup:

Here's the page info from Firefox:

Manish Bhardwaj hotlinked to all of the images for my Obscurity writeup:

OpenAdmin

Manish Bhardwaj also ripped off my writeup on OpenAdmin:

More word-for-word plagiarism from Manish Bhardwaj:

My writeup:

I guess I should be thankful he linked to my github instead of claiming that as his own too:

I'm not the only person he steals from though:

The original source:

You can find that original post he stole from here.

Traverxec

Yet more plagiarism. Manish Bhardwaj is passing this off as his own:

The real source:

The only time Manish Bhardwaj hosts an image on his site is when it's stolen and snipped:

The original post Manish Bhardwaj stole from can be found here.

Mango

More plagiarism:

Again, the only time Manish Bhardwaj hosts the image is when it's snipped:

The original post Manish Bhardwaj stole from can be found here.

An Unplesasant Surprise (for Manish Bhardwaj)

Since I have full control of this server, I made some tweaks to my webserver configuration. Without touching anything on his server, his writeups that plagiarized my images now look like this:

I would love to see his face when he discovers this :D.

The Plagiarizer

Look at this guy's profile:

Manish Bhardwaj bills himself as a Certified Ethical Hacker and appears to be teaching courses on the subject:

Part of being an ethical hacker is well, being ETHICAL. There is nothing ethical about plagiarizing other people's work and passing it off as your own. I strongly encourage anyone thinking of hiring Manish Bhardwaj to reconsider and look elsewhere. Can you really trust him not to do anything shady with your network given the behavior exhibited here?

To add insult on top of injury, he is trying to profit off plagiarizing others by monetizing with Google ads!

To sum it all up: