Phrack

This is a complete waste of time and money with the usual bullshit material taught by people who don't really have a clue and completely-out-of-touch-with-reality academic focus (write a buffer overflow!).

If you really want to learn invaluable cybersecurity skills,
start playing wargames. I suggest (1) which is one of the best. If you manage to reach level 25 on your own, then you are elite and the knowledge you gained doing so is not only extremely valuable but something you can be proud of.

(Sidenote: I would hire anyone who reached vortex level 25 on the spot and pay him a six figure salary, without looking at any of his other qualifications/degrees/past experience)

Additionally, read every single phrack (2) magazine from the past 20 years and try to understand most of the material within.

(1) http://overthewire.org/wargames/vortex/

(2) http://phrack.com

While Phrack has stopped, there is the Paper Feed (no generic link, just have to link to the latest in the feed) http://phrack.org/papers/escaping_from_freebsd_bhyve.html

I think one big change these days is just that more people will self-publish their writeups and research. There are also a lot more security conferences that people present at some with a more narrow focus than the well known conferences too leading to more specialty content.

I do a weekly podcast[0] talking just about the latest exploits and strategies/research from the last week and pulling content for that is basically just following a ton of RSS feeds. There is a lot more getting written these days compared with the years when Phrack was regularly released. Unfortunately its also more spread out and harder to find.

[0] https://dayzerosec.com

Thanks for linking to Mudge's article - and for providing a time-line. For completeness - Smashing the stack for fun and profit:

http://phrack.org/issues/49/14.html#article

And in the same issue: a profile on Mudge!:
http://phrack.org/issues/49/4.html#article

> We discussed for a long time who in the hacking world today best
exemplifies everything that is right with hacking today, and we came
up with a unanimous conclusion that it was Mudge. And so we were quite
happy that our first choice for the first pro-phile that we have done
accepted our invitation. He cracked your Apple warez when you couldn't,
he wrote buffer overflows before they were cool, he owned your Sendmail
(and probably still does), and he still manages to give more back to the
community than anyone else around.

Just to add to conversation, IMO the smol web is mostly in need of great content, and discoverability.

When I say great content, I mean something that can federate a large audience and serve as a reference and inspiration for others.

Today most of content creator are producing for the rich web, so most of the interaction happen there, and as a result most of the new content is formatted for the rich web.

From the top of my head, Phrack Magazine [1] is the only examples I can think of text based good content. It is mostly aimed at a very specific audience, but I am sure they are other examples out there.

Which basically lead to the other question of discoverability...

1: http://phrack.org/

HACK THE PLANET! This is great!

You seem to have folks leveraging XSS against the leaderboard (classic!). Of course, the JSON is available via https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/api/leaderboard?limit=1000&offset=0). XSS in the top entry (purportedly completed in -1e+129ms) might be firing since I get redirected to the Hacker's Manifesto included in the 40th anniversary issue of Phrack ;-)

```
{
"scores": [
{
"alias": "\u003Cimg onerror='document.location = `https://phrack.org/issues/7/3#article`' src=a\u003ESHOUTSOUTTOPHRACK\u003C/img\u003E",
"time_ms": -1e+129
}
...OTHER ATTEMPTS FOLLOW...
```

Regardless, thanks for sharing! Very cool!

Much of the early work on buffer overrun exploitation was published in Phrack. The article Brandon Baker and I did for IEEE Security and Privacy had a sidebar on "Nontraditional literature on buffer overruns" that's got some greatest hits like AlephOne’s Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit from 1996 [1] and The Advanced return-into-lib(c) Exploits from 2001 [2]. Over the years, a surprising number of people have told me that this was their favorite part of the article!

[1] https://www.phrack.org/show.php?p=49&a=14

[2] https://www.phrack.org/show.php?p=58&a=4