May 08
21
Cuckoo’s Egg
In the past few weeks i have read to older non fiction books, The Cuckoo’s Egg (1991) – Clifford Stoll and Cyberpunk (1995) – Katie Hafner and John Markoff.
Firstly i will say if you have both of these books , you should read the Cuckoo’s Egg first. I read Cyberpunk first and it gave away a lot of the mystery and intrigue.
A sypnosis of the two books without giving too much away;
The Cuckoos Egg is about a self proclaimed hippie at Berkley called Clif Stoll who noticed the the MainFrame account was out by 75 cents. When he investigated the issue he ascertained that a hacker had broken into his system. This 75 cents lead Cliff to track the hacker without any support from any law enforcement agency viz, CIA, FBI, NSA etc.
The hacker had been breaking into the military computers on ARPANET and copying files. Still the law agencies were not interested. Eventually it was ascertained that the hacker came from Germany and was working for the KGB.
Perhaps the most humorous part of the book was when Cliff tried to dry his shoes in a microwave. It left me in fits of laughter.
Cyberpunk documents the stories of three prominent hack stories from the point of the hackers/phreakers. It also includes the hack attack from the Cuckoo’s Egg. Moreover the last story is about the problems Cliff writes about in the Cuckoo’s Egg which crippled the Internet of the time.
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