Phrack Inc.

Phrack Inc is a privately held Canadian corporation which publishes an irregular corporate newsletter. Commonly known as "Phrack Magazine," this newsletter (ISSN 1068-1035) is written by and for hackers, and was first published on November 17, 1985, on the Metal Shop BBS. Described by Fyodor as "the best, and by far the longest running hacker zine," the magazine is open for contributions from the wider community who wish to express original ideas on the newsletter's three proscribed topics; hacking, phreaking and anarchy. The corporate newsletter has no direct circulation or official web presence; each issue is uploaded once to a single BBS, and then shared by both hackers and computer security professionals. Even shareholders and members of the board of directors are required to find a copy themselves. Only the editorial board ever sees all submissions. Phrack is completely reader-driven. It pays nothing and only accepts complete work as submissions, much like an academic journal. Phrack is popular for its lengthy history as the primary magazine for hackers, and predates the popularization of the Internet by almost 2 decades. The consistently high standard it offers when compared to other infosec magazines drives readership. It publishes on no set schedule, with each new release coming only when sufficient quality information has been collected for dissemination. Also, all contributors are pseudonymous, as the information provided is usually of questionable legality. Some examples of this include: "\/\The Conscience of a Hacker/\/ (aka the Hacker Manifesto)" by ++The Mentor++, published in issue 7, remains the constitution document of every generation of hackers since. "Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit" by Aleph One, published in issue 49, literally wrote the book stack buffer overflows, thereby making them "a thing." "The Art of Scanning" by Fyodor, published in Issue 51, was the official debut of the now-ubiquitous internet scanning tool nmap.