The Cuckoo's Egg

The first person to ever catch a hacker wasn’t an FBI or CIA agent. It was an astronomer, and his name was Clifford Stoll. This book is a biographical account of how he took on a German hacker who was selling secrets to the KGB in the 1980s. I love this book because it shows how anyone can play a role in cybersecurity.

As a kid, I watched the TV adaptation of the book for PBS’s NOVA program and went into cybersecurity in large part because of Stoll. Because cybersecurity wasn’t a profession at the time, Stoll created his own… show more.

A nonfiction book about an actual nerd who stubbornly investigated a 75 cent accounting error and ended up uncovering an international espionage ring during the Cold War. As nerds do. Along the way, he invented many techniques still used in cybersecurity. It ought to be dry, but it’s funny and charming and it perfectly evokes Berkeley in the 1980s. I was a computer operator at Carnegie Mellon and my workday was very similar to Stoll’s. For me this book was a time machine to my early 20s. I could see, hear, and feel every scene. If you ever think that… show more.

A system administrator’s suspenseful account of the hunt for a hacker who broke into the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The author trumpeted the experience and became a hero in cybersecurity circles. This was the first real proof available to laymen that cybersecurity adversaries were a force with which to be reckoned. Unfortunately, for most global corporations, it fell on deaf ears.

Anyone interested in digital security simply has to read this book. It isn’t really a book about cryptography, although cryptography plays a minor role. This is simply a wonderfully-told honest tale about someone ahead of their time who decided to investigate an anomaly they noticed on a computer system they were responsible for in the 1980s. Through bloody-minded perseverance, Stoll unraveled something that foretold much of what has happened since – the extraordinary complexity and connectivity of modern computers and the ramifications that events somewhere in the network can have elsewhere. Such a tale would probably be dull and technical… show more.