≫ [PDF] The Cuckoo Egg Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage Cliff Stoll 8601200542172 Books

The Cuckoo Egg Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage Cliff Stoll 8601200542172 Books

Download As PDF : The Cuckoo Egg Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage Cliff Stoll 8601200542172 Books

The Cuckoo Egg Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage Cliff Stoll 8601200542172 Books

A great read. If you're a Unix sysadmin, like myself, you will recognize and emphathize with a lot of the concepts. If you've been doing sysadmin work for more than a decade, like myself, then you'll remember the old technologies as described in this book - the modems, the bulliten boards, the days before "ssh" ... If you're a new-school sysadmin, then you will be suprised to see a lot of things haven't changed in the world of Unix: telnet is still around, the "root" account is still around. The foundations of Unix were laid in the early 1970s. The events of this book took place in the 1980s. And many of the command line tools are still in use today.

Anyway, a lot of sysadmins learn their trade because they are thrown into the fire without any prior experience, as happened to the author of this book, and it's entertaining to see him, a computer novice, teach himself what he needed to know to track down a hacker and to educate the U.S. military people in the process. I also found it interesting that, despite the fact that the author was basically a liberal, "anti-establishment", ex-hippie, he nonetheless felt such a sense of pride in his computer network that he was offended that a hacker should be in there mucking around, and this feeling of "ownership" and "responsibility" for his network spurred him on to try to catch the guy.

If you don't know anything about computers, you'll enjoy the book because, not only does the author explain concepts in layman terms, but as others have pointed out the book itself reads like a spy novel of sorts, and there's also quite a bit of humor thrown in, so it's quite entertaining overall.


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The Cuckoo Egg Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage Cliff Stoll 8601200542172 Books Reviews

The Cuckoo's Egg revolves around the true adventures of an astronomer, Cliff Stoll, turned UNIX system administrator, from the moment of his discovery of a security breach on his networked computers, how he tracked the intruder's activities, and how the intruder was finally brought to justice. For those of us familiar with Unix system administration, especially security-related work, many of the commands and techniques detailed in the book enhances our knowledge and enriches our appreciation for the operating system, as wells as stamping it with technical authenticity.

Although the story is somewhat dated, starting in the late 80’s, there are still many lessons to be learned from it today. Continually reviewing audit logs is critical to the security of any system and without doing that, the protagonist would not have found the intrusion and been able to track the duplicitous activities of the hacker. Cliff also wrote many scripts and developed some innovative methods to secure and keep track of the intrusion continuously. Although he worked hard at his job, he was also good at communicating and reaching out to many other folks within his organization at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, as well as many others beyond, including commercial, military, federal, and international agencies. Lastly, he was meticulous in his documentation, which helped to solve the case and ultimately provided proof of everything he did to people that he needed help from.

Cliff Stoll is a good writer with a somewhat eccentric point of view. I enjoyed his humor as well as the humorous situations he gets into. This is probably the first documented case of an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) on a multi-organizational scale. I had a very hard time putting this book down and highly recommend it as an important history lesson to all within the computer security or information technology (IT) field.
This is a nostalgic read for me, as I read it in hardback when it first came out. It is revealing how naive we computer folks were about security in the 80's. The book is well written and entertaining- both humorous and somewhat of a thriller. BTW, the international hack described in the book affected some systems I administrated at the time - a VAX/VMS cluster at a major university where I was employed. Clifford was largely responsible for nailing the hackers from his UC Berkeley operation, which incidentally, was also running both VMS and the then new Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) on DEC VAX hardware. Great book; fascinating times - sort of the Wild West days of computer networking.
Internet security is a major problem. This novel was written in 1989, and yet the U.S. Government agencies handling our personal information were to ignorant or in denial of the problem and refused to implement cyber security measures. Today, the U.S. Government is doing better, but with our Washington politicians on their "lower taxes no matter what" roll and under funding all agencies, huge leaks are a ticking time bomb with our personal information. Author Stoll leads us down the frustrating path of the early days of cyber theft and how he relentlessly pursued the attackers. I felt the ending was unsatisfactory, but that is because the real world is not Hollywood, and he was relating what happened in the real world.

*Note Just a few weeks ago in 2017 Equifax, one of the largest credit reporting bureaus in the U.S., allowed a back door to their data and over 141 million records were stolen, including mine. Think your personal information is safe online? As long as businesses and government politicians continue to deny problems and under fund data security none of our personal information is safe.
A great read. If you're a Unix sysadmin, like myself, you will recognize and emphathize with a lot of the concepts. If you've been doing sysadmin work for more than a decade, like myself, then you'll remember the old technologies as described in this book - the modems, the bulliten boards, the days before "ssh" ... If you're a new-school sysadmin, then you will be suprised to see a lot of things haven't changed in the world of Unix telnet is still around, the "root" account is still around. The foundations of Unix were laid in the early 1970s. The events of this book took place in the 1980s. And many of the command line tools are still in use today.

Anyway, a lot of sysadmins learn their trade because they are thrown into the fire without any prior experience, as happened to the author of this book, and it's entertaining to see him, a computer novice, teach himself what he needed to know to track down a hacker and to educate the U.S. military people in the process. I also found it interesting that, despite the fact that the author was basically a liberal, "anti-establishment", ex-hippie, he nonetheless felt such a sense of pride in his computer network that he was offended that a hacker should be in there mucking around, and this feeling of "ownership" and "responsibility" for his network spurred him on to try to catch the guy.

If you don't know anything about computers, you'll enjoy the book because, not only does the author explain concepts in layman terms, but as others have pointed out the book itself reads like a spy novel of sorts, and there's also quite a bit of humor thrown in, so it's quite entertaining overall.