What journal is going to accept a study like this if they haven't obtained proper consent?

IEEE, see the publications list at https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~kjlu/

>>>On the Feasibility of Stealthily Introducing Vulnerabilities in Open-Source Software via Hypocrite Commits Qiushi Wu, and Kangjie Lu. To appear in Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland'21). Virtual conference, May 2021.

May 2021 -- I guess some IEEE member can complain loudly to take it down.

My guess is: a journal that does not focus on studies of human behavior and whose editors are a) not aware of the ethical problems or b) happy to ignore ethics concerns if the publication is prone to receive much attention (which it is).

The IEEE apparently. It is a clear breach of ethics but apparently they don't care

Sadly, that only consolidates my view of that organization.

That might be an interesting topic for research LoL

That’s about as useful as to answer the question “what is this company doing?” with “trying to make money”.

But that question is as deep and important to answer as yours :D What can anyone hope to accomplish by doing fake research ? Progress, wealth, peer approval, mating, pleasure ?

So answering that they hope to get more material for papers, which is the only goal of researchers (and their main KPI), is quite deeper an answer than the question required.

I wouldn't call this fake research. Maybe unethical, but they did do research, and they did obtain data,and they did (attempt?) to publish it.

It's a near perfect example of the dangers 'publish or perish'.