By Cliff Stoll
This was a fun read. An astronomer finds an accounting discrepancy on the lab’s computer system. He spends a year investigating the source and finds that it’s a hacker from West Germany using his system to connect to US military systems. It was interesting watching international hacking happen before the internet and before most people had a concept of networked computers. At the time, the hacking wasn’t even illegal.
- Stoll pleaded for help from local law enforcement, the FBI, CIA, NSA, Air Force Office of Special Investigations. He received little cooperation and the organizations didn’t work with each other at all. The intelligence failures leading up to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks came to mind while experiencing the frustration of inaction described by Stoll.
- It’s wild looking back to a world with no encryption on the communication. Stoll is able to monitor all of the actions of the hacker because the communications are not encrypted.
- There’s a moment in the book where Stoll expresses frustration with the NSA for knowing about security flaws but not warning anybody about them. He doesn’t really acknowledge why. This is How They Tell Me the World Ends describes the answer. They don’t want to lose their opportunities to observe.
- The Chaos Computer Club hackers argued that they were providing some benefit to the computer world by alerting people to the insecurity of the systems. Stoll argues that this is like a thief arriving to a trusting, close-knit community and destroying their trust.
- There are a couple additional sources related to this. Stoll reenacted the events himself in this NOVA production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gHNVNRQTJg. This was a hard watch. Big budget, hollywood movies are regularly worse than the book. This is a low-budget, public broadcasting recreation. That comes with the quality their resources would suggest.
- Another target of CCC was responsible for catching a hacker of DEC computers. He shared his story in https://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Cuckoos-Egg-tracking-k-ebook/dp/B0D584X2TR?crid=153I7HFRVNJAN&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.8Lk0J9Sf8J_mw7Hgd5Mi1yyQDNLiHKsFUGVmwWoWWvlrJjIMEOw8pkeZFOIya_iL.92x6lwv68IPZGkHZ877Dv06aStumGlevDReOyO2ona0&dib_tag=se&keywords=cracking+the+cuckoo%27s+egg&qid=1754849185&sprefix=cracking+the+cuckoos+egg%2Caps%2C153&sr=8-1. This is a quicker, just the facts accounting of his encounter with CCC.
- Stoll learned of the concept of password cracking through pre-computation attacks. For much of the book, he spoke of the non-reversable obfuscation of user passwords, but discovered later that this system could be defeated.