In 1986, Clifford Stoll and his coworkers were frustrated by what they thought was a billing error of 75 cents in their monthly accounting. Suspecting a software bug, the new guy (Clifford) was put on to working out the error as a starter problem while he got familiar with the systems he was to manage…
I’ve been home sick this week with a chest infection, and what with having a limited oxygen supply I didn’t feel like I was braining super well. So what better way to pass the time between naps than another old book I’ve read before? This is another book I must have read before I started blogging such things, but discussions of old computing systems made me a bit nostalgic for a good gold fashioned tale of computer hackery. The story has some historical significance too, as shown by this quote from Wikipedia:
This was one of the first — if not the first — documented cases of a computer break-in, and Stoll seems to have been the first to keep a daily logbook of the hacker’s activities.
There are a few things which strike me about this story — Stoll was lucky. He arguably committed crimes himself while chasing the intruder. Much worse, literally no one in the US Federal government or the various police forces he contacted seemed to really care about unauthorized access to military systems. If the one persistent guy hadn’t persisted, the intruder would simply never have gotten caught.
Another striking element is the alignment with the story told in Cult of the Dead Cow, who were founded at about the same time as this story but didn’t really become activist until about a decade later. Fundamentally, both stories are about complacency and a disregard for what we would consider basic computer security practices these days.
I enjoyed this book. Its a bit dated to be honest, but hey it was written 40 years ago.
Biography & Autobiography
Simon and Schuster
September 13, 2005
416
The first true account of computer espionage tells of a year-long single-handed hunt for a computer thief who sold information from American computer files to Soviet intelligence agents