Authors: Cliff Stoll
Date read: 2022-11-23
The Cuckoo's Egg is a true story of tracing a hacker at the late 80s, where it was the early days of having security issues in the computer world.
Cliff Stoll (the author and the main character of the book) is an American astronomer who starts working as system administrator at Lawrence Berkeley Lab (LBL). At that time LBL provided sophisticated computers, so that the scientists could connect to them via Internet (telnet), and use the horse-power of the available big machines, and pay a fee to LBL.
One day a Cliff's colleague informs him that 75 cents is lost in LBL's accounting system. Cliff starts investigating to see what has happened, and finds out that there is a hacker in his system. As Cliff didn't know what the hacker has done to his systems, he decides to investigate what damage the hacker has done so far and what his intentions are.
Cliff makes some tools to log all the activities of the hacker to figure out the intrusion better. So every single time that the hacker logs in, all his interactions gets printed. With the help of these logs Cliff realizes that the hacker is after military information (e.g. Army databases). Finally with tracing the incoming internet connection (which was essentially telephone lines with dial-up modems), Cliff finds out that the hacker is actually not in the US, but in Germany. All and all, after that the German police arrest the hacker, they realize that he is a drop-out student who tried to sell information to the Soviet block of Germany, so that he can make some money.
The thing that I liked about the book was Cliff's enthusiasm and perseverance to learn more in his new position as system admin, and the tooling that he makes to better capture hacker's activities. The book is actually too long, and could have been shorter if the writer had stripped out some of the repetitive login/logout of the hacker.
Rating: 4/5