The Cuckoo's Egg

Clifford Stoll was an astronomer who had ended up running the computers at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1986. His book is the first-person account of what happened next, and it reads like a detective novel.

What it’s about

It starts small. The laboratory’s computer accounting system showed a mismatch of 75 cents in usage charges. Stoll set out to explain it and found that someone was using the lab’s systems without permission. He spent months tracing the intruder, who was breaking into computers at universities, military sites, and defense contractors across the networks of the time.

His methods were improvised and sometimes charming: printouts, a night-time vigil, and a fake set of files designed to keep the intruder connected long enough to be traced. The trail eventually led to Germany and, in the book’s account, to a hacker selling information to the Soviet KGB. Stoll shows how much of the work was ordinary persistence, along with the cooperation, and the frustrations, of dealing with agencies that did not yet know how to handle computer crime.

Why it belongs on coldboot

It is one of the earliest and most vivid accounts of computer security, set in the world that the 1980s articles describe: Unix machines, dial-up modems, and research networks that trusted their users. It is also a reminder that the history of software includes the people who defended it.

Keep in mind

This is Stoll’s own telling of events from the late 1980s, simplified for general readers, and the technology is of its time. It is still among the most readable accounts of a real intrusion investigation, and a window into how open and trusting the early network was.

Edition linked: paperback (Pocket Books, 2000).