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| In the mid-1980s, Stoll was an astronomer at Lawrence Berkeley Labs who got displaced (reassigned?) to computer system management duties, on DEC VAX computer systems (he spells 'em as "Vax", as a proper noun, not the acronym that it is) running both VMS and Unix. The LBL user community included astronomers, physicists, and plenty of other scientific-academic types. Attitudes were open, sharing, and security-naïve; Stoll's world-view, like most of his colleagues, was hippie-derived and fully distrustful of authority, "the man," and of government in general. Yet he had to turn to members in the usual three-letter-acronym organizations for help in his chase. | In the mid-1980s, Stoll was an astronomer at Lawrence Berkeley Labs who got displaced (reassigned?) to computer system management duties, on DEC VAX computer systems (he spells 'em as "Vax", as a proper noun, not the acronym that it is) running both VMS and Unix. The LBL user community included astronomers, physicists, and plenty of other scientific-academic types. Attitudes were open, sharing, and security-naïve; Stoll's world-view, like most of his colleagues, was hippie-derived and fully distrustful of authority, "the man," and of government in general. Yet he had to turn to members in the usual three-letter-acronym organizations for help in his chase. |
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| Researching a 75¢ computer time accounting error (yes, they "charged for computer time" in those days), he discovered a black-hat cracker in the LBL computer systems -- he then spent the next months trying to chase the interloper down. The story is all about Cliff's persistence, frustrations, and the learning he earned in the pursuit: networks, hardware, telecomm, OOP, Unix and VMS, and more. Spoiler alert... He caught the bad guy -- Actually, a whole spy ring, not surprising, given the KGB's sponsorship during the last years of the Cold War. | Researching a 75¢ computer time accounting error (yes, they "charged for computer time" in those days), he discovered a black-hat cracker in the LBL computer systems -- he then spent the next months trying to chase the interloper down. The story is all about Cliff's persistence, frustrations, and the learning he earned in the pursuit: networks, hardware, telecomm, OOP, Unix and VMS, and more. Spoiler alert... He caught the bad guy -- Actually, a whole spy ring, not surprising, given the KGB's sponsorship during the last years of the Cold War. Stoll was, temporarily at least, acclaimed as a national hero. Actually, quite an intriguing detective story. |
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| | But what struck me most, from this perspective of 30-odd years later, is just how innocent and naïve everyone was about computer security in those days. Especially in academe and the research labs, passwords were viewed as an anti-social obstacle, and were treated cavalierly at most military installations. The bad-guy "broke into" several military VMS systems just by "guessing" the default passwords for the privileged ''SYSTEM'' (default password ''MANAGER'') and ''FIELD'' (''SERVICE'') -- Fortunately, VMS system installation has progressed considerably beyond those defaults today. The bad-guy also hit numerous Unix systems, quickly trying and succeeding with common ''root'' account passwords (including ''admin'', ''root'' and ''1234''). Several government contractors (major defense-industry corporations) were "wide open" and available for the bad-guy to leap-frog through to other systems, all while the defense contractors' system managers were professing that "our systems are totally secure and impenetrable!" Stoll showed them all a new, emerging reality. |
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| | In the intervening 30 years, we've seen not only the rise and domination of today's Internet (remember, it was immature when Stoll wrote this book), and the eclipse or transformation of the ad-hoc point-to-point networks, Tymnet, and the dedicated milnet. The U.S. Armed Forces made a big noise about "security" and "classified/top-secret," but were largely clueless about its implementation on actual computer systems. The TLA-organizations, including the FBI and CIA, were XXX... |
