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

It's the account of a mid eighties astronomer who gets a junior job in the IT department of Berkley. Just to give him something to do they ask him to look into a 75 cent discrepancy in the billing for computer time. He gets obsessed with this and it ends up a year long mission involving every three letter agency you've ever heard of, and a bunch you haven't, and capturing a German hacker selling secrets to the KGB.From the very early days of the internet, long before the world wide web, when nobody took IT security seriously, all those TLA were fighting each other and passing the buck and hackers were learning to exploit weaknesses and lax security. A fascinating read. Enough technical detail to let you know what is happening but simple enough for any layman to understand.And a warning about lax security procedures that are even more relevant today now that everything is online.

If you've never heard of Cliff Stoll then you should check him out, he's an incredibly interesting bloke.Aside from that, this book is his account of discovering and tracking down a hacker who'd gotten into a university mainframe, it's properly old school with terminals, modems and dot matrix printers but it's a heck of a story and worth the investment of your time.Bonus, the 2nd hand copy I got came with a folded up newspaper article from the original reports of the case!

I couldn't put this book down. In the midst of all the exposures of the workings of government by Snowden and Assange, this is a tale of the opposite - one man's battle to expose a computer hacker who threatened the heart of the US military machine. I won't spoil the book by revealing the ending. I shall say no more, for fear of doing just that!

Quick delivery and good quality book

Cliff tells an interesting story of an accounting error in the computers at Berkley University. His work to understand this uncovered a computer hacker with access to many other systems including the US military.This account of the first ever ad hoc network monitoring, using printers connected to incoming modem lines, makes me realise how far we have come. While the technology has changed, the threat faced is still the same. Universities and Military organisations are still regularly attacked.This book is a must read for anyone in the cyber defence industry, but also an enjoyable novel for anyone interested in espionage or computer warfare.I have given this book 5 stars. Less for the writing ability and story (which are also great) but for the fact that this book will go down in history as THE book to read on network defence.

This book should be an essential read for anyone interested in Cyber security. Its a great read and I just could not put the book down. Whether your a student, hacker, black hat, white hat, computer security professional or law enforcement its a must read. The story remains extremely relevant to present day. The general modus operandi of today hackers remains the same. To me this book is up there with 1984 and Animal Farm...but this is not satirical its a true story.If i was a teacher, lecturer or mentor in Cyber security/Network Security this would be a compulsory read!

I read this not long after it came out, and it's as vibrant and compelling now as it was nearly 30 years ago. Slightly mellowed by time from an urgent tale of cyber security and social engineering to a more historical mystery, the charm, authenticity and poise of the prose shines just as brightly. Following an near unbelievable true story from "revolve this accounting error" to "KGB assassination in East Berlin", Stoll waves a compelling narrative through a formative period in the evolution of the internet. Highly recommended. Just buy it.

So Cliff Stoll, astronomer, gets a job as a computer bod at Berkeley. He comes across a discrepancy in accounting of about 75 cents for computer time and when he investigates further he finds out that there is much more going on than meets the eye.Written with a good sense of humour, this book cracks along, taking us through the various stages of Cliff's investigation, from what he was doing on a technical basis, to his encounters with the American Intelligence Services (yes, there's an obvious joke there), to his relationship with his girlfriend. Because he writes about his own low knowledge levels (being a novice techie at the time)this allows him to explain the concepts being dealt with, such as operating system stuff. Thus the book acts as a good primer for understanding networking and the nascent internet of the day, as well as how hackers would go about breaking into systems. (There's also a recipe for cookies in there. Cliff is not one for forgetting the smaller things in life.)I enjoyed it greatly. The information here is probably a bit outdated, but it's an intriguing story nonetheless.