Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll

THE CUCKOO'S EGG by Clifford Stoll is subtitled the more descriptive though less poetic "Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Counterespionage." although much of the world has changed since these events of 1989, it's still a fascinating story sure to appeal to everyone who enjoys reading about computers and international espionage, because it's a true story of both. THE CUCKOO'S EGG by Clifford Stoll takes us back to the days when the Internet was unknown to those of us outside the scientific and academic worlds and the Soviet Union was an active threat.

THE CUCKOO'S EGG by Clifford Stoll -- an astronomer by training -- starts his second day on the job as a systems administrator at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. He is faced with an earth-shaking problem -- a 75 cent discrepancy in the phone bill!

If he had more experience and confidence, he may have ignored that to focus his attention on problems of a higher priority, but didn't, so he decided he ought to be able to quickly learn who on his network had logged 75 cents worth of computer time without accounting for it.

So he checked through the user accounts and discovered the culprit -- Hunter. But Hunter didn't have a valid billing address. Who was Hunter?

Although some of the details of the days that follow may be too detailed for some readers, they are as fascinating as Tom Clancy at his technical best.

Its mail utility runs with root privileges, allowing the hacker to substitute his own Unix atun program for the real one -- the cuckoo's egg of the title -- and therefore granting himself super-user status in the system, meaning he can do anything he wanted.

The only clue he slips is a one letter command that gives away his unfamiliarity with the Berkeley version of Unix in use at the Lawrence Laboratory. He uses stodgy old AT&T Unix -- so he couldn't be a local student, but from the East Coast.

That doesn't keep him from using his super-user status on their network to hack into military base networks and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and MILNET, the network of the Department of Defense.

Realizing he is dealing with a potential national security threat, and just ticked off at somehow hacking into HIS system, Stoll steadfastly tracks the intruder through the phone systems of the world, including ARPANET of the Internet and TYMNET, a long distance telephone network.

Staying up late every night because he never knew when the hacker would come, Stoll step by step tracks him back to the East Coast and then overseas. Getting the cooperating of the FBI, overseas telephone companies and law enforcement was difficult, but he finally got the finger pointed at one Markus Hess of the University of Bremen, Germany.

In those days the champion hackers were the Chaos Club of Germany, and Markus Hess apparently knew some of them. Although they claimed to hack to improve security, Hess and some others apparently provided their computer skills to the Soviet Union, who paid them for the information they discovered.

THE CUCKOO'S EGG by Clifford Stoll is highly recommended for anyone interested in the "early" days of computing, hacking and international espionage.

Next: DOS for Dummies by Dan Gookin