The Roer Group stand on plagiarism

Three weeks ago, I was on London, at the RSA Europe Conference to launch our latest book, The Cloud Security Rules. It was a proud moment, marking the end of almost two years of work, with 15 co-authors from around the world. I spoke with peers and journalists, and gave away review copies, hoping for overwhelming positive feedback (in the hope that great reviews would help push the sales of this book).

Coming home, I was thrilled with the feedback we got on Twitter and other channels.

Then, the bomb blasted in my face last Saturday.

Attrition.org, a long time contributor to fight plagiarism, posted an accusation towards one of our co-authors, accusing him for plagiarism on his blog. I was alerted to the accusations very early, and immediately decided we needed to review the contributing chapters in The Cloud Security Rules book. Unfortunately, both our internal investigations, and the third-party investigations conducted showed evidence of plagiarism also in the two chapters contributed to the book.

Upon the discovery, The Roer Group, the publisher of the book, immediately took action to recall The Cloud Security Rules from the market. We also decided to do a new, full review of the book. We asked for the help from Attrition.org staff, whom agreed to do a full technical edit of the book. No, we did not pay for this, so they have no reason to be nice to us in any way.

We also decided to remove the two chapters written by Mourad ben Lakhoua from the book, and we are taking actions to write a new chapter on the topic of Datacenter security in the cloud.

Obviously, our actions does not come without cost. As I have repeatedly stated, I am here to make a better world. The Roer Group donates the profit of all the books we publish to charity. We engage in helping people move from short-sighted «me, myself and I» mentality, to develop sustainable leadership. We are committed to go further, to be better, to show the road ahead. And we believe our actions can and will make a difference. We have no choice but to do the right thing. And the right thing in this case is very clear - pull the book from the market, fix the errors, then relaunch.

The book will be relaunched later this year, with the updated content, and with a better quality than before.

We, The Roer Group, and I, the editor, sincerely apologize for our failure to spot the plagiarism before the launch of the book. Luckily, less than 50 books made it «out» in the wild, and we believe our prompt actions have reduced the possible damage to a bare minimum.

The Roer Group wish to thank Attrition.org for their important work of searching for plagiarism. We also want to thank some of the people who supported us, and helped us making the right choices during this crisis, namely @brianhonan and @wimremes.

We also would like to note that Mourad ben Lakhoua have accepted his responsibilities, and promise to change his methods for writing on his blog in the future. A public statement from him is expected this week. We trust that he will do as he promise, and only time will show.