The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Cliff Stoll

The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Cliff Stoll

Author:Cliff Stoll
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Science & Technology, Fiction, Political Science, Classified - United States - Databases, Espionage, Political Freedom & Security, Computer Crimes - Germany - Hannover, Computer Crimes - United States, Stoll, Computers, Markus, Classified, Computer Crimes, Security, Soviet, Soviet - Germany - Hannover, Soviet - United States, Mystery & Detective, Intelligence, General, Defense Information, Biography & Autobiography, Hess, Clifford
ISBN: 9781416507789
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2005-09-12T22:00:00+00:00


33

I'D KICKED OVER AN ANTHILL. FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, I COULDN'T GET AWAY FROM my phone. The spooks kept calling back, asking for technical details—how do you connect from Europe into military computers? Could I prove that the hacker came from Germany? Where did he pick up passwords? How did he become super-user?

The Air Force OSI, however, worried about how to defend the Milnet. Did the hacker get into this site or that network? What type of computers did he attack?

Could we contain him by locking him out of Lawrence Berkeley Labs?

Finally, Steve White called. He'd received a terse message from the manager of the German Datex network:

"The address belongs to a computer in Bremen. We investigate."

Our circle was slowly closing.

I was off to the library again, paging through the atlas. Bremen's a port city in northern Germany, renowned for its medieval paintings and town hall.

Momentarily, my thoughts flew across the Atlantic . . . these are places from history books.

On the heels of Steve's call, Mike Muuss of the Ballistic Research Laboratory called. In Aberdeen, Maryland, the Army runs a research and development laboratory; it's one of the last government labs that doesn't farm out its research to private contractors. Mike's their computer honcho.

Mike Muuss—he's famous throughout the Unix community as a pioneer in networking and as a creator of elegant programs to replace awkward ones. As Mike puts it, good programs aren't written or built. They're grown. A six-foot-tall, mustached runner, he's incredibly driven, intense, and obsessed. Mike's paid his dues on ancient versions of Unix, dating back to the '70s. When Mike talks, other wizards listen.

"We detected Joe Sventek probing our system on Sunday," Mike Muuss said. "I thought he was in England."

Do all wizards know each other? Is it telepathy?

"He is," I replied. "You detected a hacker masquerading as Joe."

"Well, keep him off the network. Boot him out."

I'd been through that before. "Closing him from my computer probably won't stop him."

"Oh, he's in a lot of computers, huh?" Mike understood.

We chatted about an hour, and I tried to hide my ignorance. Mike assumed that I knew about the Eniac, the world's first big computer. "Yep, it was right here at Ballistics Research Lab. Back in 1948. Ten years before I was born."

Eniac might have been their first world class computer, but hardly their last.

Now, the Army runs a pair of Cray supercomputers—the fastest in the world. Without much modesty, Mike said, "If you want to see the Army in the year 2010, look in my computers today. It's all there."

Exactly what the hacker wanted.

Soon after that call, Chris McDonald of White Sands phoned. He'd also heard someone pounding at his doors and wanted to know what we intended to do about it.

"Nothing," I replied. "Nothing until the bastard's been arrested." A bluff, considering the chances of even discovering where the hacker lived.

The hacker had tried to chisel into eighty computers. Two system managers had detected him.

Suppose you walked along a city street trying to force doors open.



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