The Chutzpah of an Information Security Plagiarist

A tenured academic fights back against the theft of her team’s work.

A tenured academic fights back against the theft of her team’s work.

Many in the world of cybersecurity have a deep respect for the work of others and know we stand on the shoulders of giants. Advancing an entire discipline, especially one as young as this, requires extensive cross-collaboration and the ability to regularly rely on the work of others.

Professionals in this space know that work product which did not originate with them, academic or otherwise, must be appropriately attributed in their own works.

However, not all colleagues share the same respect for one another.

Plagiarism, for which most claimants have no recourse, runs rampant throughout the cybersecurity industry and anecdotally seems to impact women and minorities disproportionately.

So what happened?

SecurityWeek (and various other outlets, such as Bleeping Computer, Dark Reading, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, USA Today, Business Insider, and Financial Times) have directly written about or cited exhaustive research per…