A new issue of the Hakin9 - Hard Core IT Security Magazine is "in the wild", and since the editorial staff has been kind enough to provide me with issues of the magazine for a while now, in this post I'll review the latest issue with the idea that constructive confrontation leads to the best output achievable.
There are many different ways to review a magazine, however, I'm always sticking to the following critical success factors for a quality magazine :
- The presence of a vision
While a vision is often taken for granted, or even worse, a mission gets misunderstood for a vision, in Hakin9's case the vision could be perhaps best rephrased as "Spoiling the geeks who beg for a nerdy talk to them".
- Content quality
The magazine truly delivers what it promises, namely, hardcode content in sections such as tools review, basics, attack, defense, book reviews, consumers test, and interviews. And whereas the key topic in this issue is LDAP cracking, I really enjoyed the Javascript obfuscation article, with the practical examples provided. A bit ironic, the issue is also reviewing a commercial source code obfuscator, which just like legitimate anti-piracy tools used by malware authors to make their binaries harder to analyze, can also be abused for malicious purposes.- Relevance of information
The information provided in the articles is highly relevant, and timely, lacking any retrospective approaches and focusing on current and emerging threats only. The same goes for the extensive external resources provided, emphasizing on the importance of self-education.
- Layout
Very well structured, and so far I haven't come across an article where the images weren't syndicated the way they should be, for instance the figures mentioned on a certain page, are the same figures available at that page. Three differentiation points make a very good impression, the level of difficulty for the article, what you should know before reading it in order to understand it, and what you will know after reading it, which you can find at the end of every article.- Visual materials
The surplus of visual materials is perhaps what won me as a reader from the first moment. In fact, the issues are so rich on visual material illustrating the topic covered in such details, that you can actually take entire sniffing, and javascript obfuscation sessions offline with you, and never ever have to picture the output of a certain process in your mind again.
- Ads
Highly targeted, and primary security related, and best of all, very well spread across the magazine, so you're exposed to more content than ads.Overall, the magazine successfully delivers what it promises to deliver - hardcode technical content from the geeks, for the geeks. Informative reading!
