Clifford Stoll

It was 1990 or 1991. I was still in charge of the ATM Centre at Ban Hin Lee Bank. Already at that time, computer security was an issue that commercial banks in Malaysia had to contend with. Although branches were connecting to their Head Office through their own private telecommunication network, there were still possibilities of security breaches. Someone at the Information Technology Division recommended that I read a certain book, IF I could find it.

It so happen that I did find this book a few months later at the British Council library. I borrowed it and for the next few days, I couldn't put it down. It was that interesting. The book was by Clifford Stoll, an astronomer turned computer sleuth. His book was The Cuckoo's Egg, which described his adventure in ultimately tracking down someone who had hacked into the central computer system at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

It all started with an anomaly of 75 cents of computer time in 1986. The nascent days of the Internet. That someone who hacked into the Berkeley Lab computer had used up nine brief seconds of computer time without paying. Nine seconds, equivalent to 75 American cents. Stoll was assigned to find out what happened. One thing leading to another, he discovered that the person had found his way into military systems across the United States. 

Tracing backwards, the greater surprise was that the hacker was dialing into the German telephone network from a computer in Germany and then connected via satellite to Berkeley Lab. Nowadays, I would be very much surprised to learn that this hacker was simply using a 1,200-baud modem to break into the US military systems but that was technology in those days and that was the type of modem used. None of the speedy 100Mbps or 300MBps broadband lines we typically have today. 

Finally, a trap was set for this hacker named Marcus Hess, and he was eventually caught and tried by the German authorities for selling military secrets to the KGB in the old Soviet Union. Today, Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg remains the go-to bible for computer security experts. Many of his early methods of detecting unauthorised intrusions in computer systems are still in use, although they have been upgraded and improved over the decades.

I've no idea when exactly I acquired my own copy of this book but it was not too many years after my initial reading. It only showed how impressed I was with the tale. I was very happy to rediscover the book in one of my cupboards recently. I'm rereading it. Still can't put it down often enough. After all, good computer espionage stuff is hard to find.