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Book Review: The Cuckoo's Egg
I've been re-reading Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg – Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage (Doubleday, 1989, hardcopy ISBN 0-385-24946-2, paperback ISBN 0-7434-1146-3 – inexpensive used copies available at Amazon.com), as an enjoyable holidays diversion and a real trip in the way-back machine! I don't recall exactly when I first read this book – must have been in the early 1990s – but re-reading it from the distance of almost 30 years (New Year's 2019) has been a whole new experience.
This is Cliff Stoll's chronicle about chasing an early black-hat hacker (a system cracker) in the early days of networked computers, with primitive trans-Atlantic connections, Tymnet, early LAN/Ethernet, and a nascent Internet with only a few hundred thousand [!!] computers connected overall, mostly in universities, some businesses and the military.
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.
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.