I started reading a book last night called The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll. I’m not a huge reader but this book peaked my interest.
It is a true story about a regular guy that was sent on a quest by his management at UC Berkeley to determine the cause of a $0.75 difference between two accounting reports for some mainframes. This is not exactly the type of job that would interest even an intern programmer but Cliff set off to find the problem.
During his research he uncovered a spy ring that was using Berkeley’s mainframes to gain access to milnet (which was a military network back in the early days of the Internet) that was backed by drugs and the KGB.
I’m only 1/4 of the way in but this book is already one of my favorites. I recommend every IT person read this book. It definitely helps you think about the importance of security since the hacker gained access to all of this through a trivial GNU Emacs bug.
Filed under: Technology
