Clifford Stoll

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
by Nir Eyal
Published 26 Dec 2013

We have plenty of messenger boys.”6 In 1911 Ferdinand Foch, the future commander in chief of the Allied forces in World War I, said, “Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.”7 In 1957 the editor of business books for Prentice Hall told his publisher, “I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.” The Internet itself, and each successive wave of innovation, has continually received criticism for its inability to gain mass appeal. In 1995 Clifford Stoll wrote a Newsweek article, “The Internet? Bah!” in which he declared, “The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper.” Stoll continued, “We’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.”8 Naturally, now we do read books and newspapers over the Internet.

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Nancy Martha West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 2000). 6. G. Cosier and P. M. Hughes, “The Problem with Disruption,” BT Technology 19, no. 4 (Oct. 2001): 9. 7. Clifford A. Pickover, Time: A Traveler’s Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 8. Clifford Stoll, “The Internet? Bah!” Newsweek (Feb. 27, 1995), http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/582/582%20readings/stoll.pdf. 9. Mike Maples Jr., “Technology Waves and the Hypernet,” Roger and Mike’s Hypernet Blog (accessed Nov. 13, 2013), http://rogerandmike.com/post/14629058018/technology-waves-and-the-hypernet. 10.

Underground
by Suelette Dreyfus
Published 1 Jan 2011

The Age The Atlantic The Australian The Australian Financial Review The Bulletin The Computer Lawyer (USA) The Connecticut Law Tribune The Daily Record (USA) The Engineer (UK) The Gazette (Montreal) The Guardian The Herald (Glasgow) The Herald (Melbourne) The Herald Sun (Melbourne) The Independent The Irish Times The Legal Intelligencer (USA) The Los Angeles Times The Nation The National Law Journal (USA) The New York Times The Recorder (USA) The Reuter European Community Report The Reuter Library Report The Scotsman The Sun (Melbourne) The Sunday Age The Sydney Morning Herald The Times The Washington Post The Washington Times The Weekend Australian Time Magazine United Nations Chronicle United Press International USA Today WikiLeaks Wired Threat Level Zdnet Transcripts: Hearing of the Transportation, Aviation and Materials Subcommittee of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee transcript: witness Clifford Stoll, 10 July 1990 ‘Larry King Live’ transcript, interview with Clifford Stoll, 23 March 1990 The World Uranium Hearing, Salzburg 1992, witness transcripts US Government Accounting Office Hearing (computer security) witness transcripts, 1996 Judgments: Chris Goggans, Robert Cupps and Scott Chasin, Appellants v. Boyd & Fraser Publishing Co., a Division of South-Western Publishing Co., Appellee No. 01-95-00331-Cv 1995 Tex.

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They chatted about life, about what Australia was like, about girls, about what was in the newspaper that day. It was easy to talk to Erik. He had a big ego, like most hackers, but it was inoffensive, largely couched in his self-effacing humour. Phoenix often made Erik laugh. Like the time he got Clifford Stoll, an astronomer, who wrote The Cuckoo’s Egg. The book described his pursuit of a German hacker who had broken into the computer system Stoll managed at Lawrence Berkeley Labs near San Francisco. The hacker had been part of the same hacking ring as Pengo. Stoll took a hard line on hacking, a position which did not win him popularity in the underground.

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Electron had felt the same wave of excitement from hacking many high-profile targets and matching wits with the best, but he was happy to stand on the peak by himself, or with people like Pad and Gandalf, and enjoy the view quietly. He was happy to know he had been the best on the frontier of a computer underground which was fresh, experimental and, most of all, international. He didn’t need to call up newspaper reporters or gloat about it in Clifford Stoll’s face. ‘Well, what do you reckon?’ Phoenix asked impatiently. ‘No,’ Electron answered. ‘No? You don’t think we will?’ Phoenix sounded disappointed. ‘No.’ ‘Well, I’ll demand it!’ Phoenix said laughing, ‘Fuck it, we want the cover of Newsweek, nothing less.’ Then, more seriously, ‘I’m trying to work out what really big target would clinch it for us.’

Cuckoo's Egg
by Clifford Stoll
Published 2 Jan 1989

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stoll, Clifford. The cuckoo’s egg : tracking a spy through the maze of computer espionage / by Clifford Stoll. — 1st ed. p. cm. 1. Hess, Marcus. 2. Stoll, Clifford. 3. Espionage, Soviet— United States. 4. Espionage, Soviet—Germany (West)— Hannover. 5. Defense information, Classified—United States—Data bases. 6. Computer crimes—United States. 7. Computer crimes— Germany (West)—Hannover. I. Title. UB271.R92H477 1989 364.1′68′0973—dc20 89-7808 364.1′68′0973—dc20 eISBN: 978-0-307-81942-0 Copyright © 1989 by Clifford Stoll All Rights Reserved v3.1 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Acknowledgments Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 Chapter 54 Chapter 55 Chapter 56 Epilogue Bibliography About the Author How do you spread the word when a computer has a security hole?

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There are a few private security conferences as well; their “invitation only” membership is indicative of the paranoia surrounding the field. There are also anonymous and pirate bulletin boards; these seldom have much useful information—but they do tell you what one segment of the population is thinking. Clifford Stoll is an astronomer by training and a computer security expert by accident. Since catching the “Hannover Hacker,” he has become a leading authority on computer security, delivering more lectures on the subject than he cares to admit. He’s given talks at the CIA and NSA, and has appeared before the U.S.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
by Matthew Ball
Published 18 Jul 2022

Sean Hollister, “Here’s What Apple’s New Rules about Cloud Gaming Actually Mean,” The Verge, September 18, 2020, accessed January 4, 2022, https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/18/20912689/apple-cloud-gaming-streaming-xcloud-stadia-app-store-guidelines-rules. Conclusion Spectators, All 1. Clifford Stoll, “Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana,” Newsweek, February 26, 1995, accessed January 6, 2022, https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306. 2. James Chapman, “Internet ‘May Just Be a Passing Fad as Millions Give Up on It,’ ” Daily Mail, December 5, 2000. 3. 9to5 Staff, “Jobs’ Original Vision for the iPhone: No Third-Party Native Apps,” 9to5Mac, October 21, 2011, accessed January 5, 2022, https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-iphone-no-third-party-native-apps/. 4.

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Tinder wasn’t invented until five years after the iPhone, at which point 70% of 18-to-34-year-olds had a touchscreen smartphone. Technology is a constraint on the Metaverse, but so is what we imagine and when. The fits and bursts of Metaverse development will lead to critiques as well as bouts of disappointment and disillusionment. In 1995, Clifford Stoll, an American astronomer and a former systems administer at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, wrote the now-infamous book, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. In an editorial for Newsweek around the book’s publication, he stated that “After two decades online, I’m perplexed . . . uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

For the big questions, the way to start is by reviewing the body of work produced by public intellectuals and scholars from a wide range of disciplines that has assessed the Internet over the past two decades, attempting to locate it in a broad historical perspective. Going back to the early 1990s—from George Gilder’s Life after Television and Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital to Clifford Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil and Lawrence Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, numerous writers have provided their assessment of the digital revolution. As one might expect, some of this material ages well, and some of it now seems ridiculous. The amount has increased, perhaps exponentially, in the past decade, becoming a veritable publishing genre.

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Virginia Eubanks, in her 2011 Digital Dead End, notes that “many of us in the United States have engaged in a massive, collective, consensual hallucination about the power of technology, particularly information technology (IT), to ‘level the playing field,’ create broad-based economic and social equality, and nurture transparency and accountability in democratic governance.”37 Even in the United States, skeptical scholars have chronicled how the Internet routinely generates bogus information, violates people’s privacy and civil rights, and facilitates various forms of harassment.38 Viktor Mayer-Schönberger writes about how people can never escape their pasts in the Internet era, and something very important to being human is being lost.39 This harks back to the first wave of skepticism by people like Clifford Stoll. In 1999’s High-Tech Heretic, Stoll emphasized that the Internet isolated people, made them addicted, and probably created more unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life than anything else.40 Sexuality is one area to which skeptics can point. The explosion in online pornography has created an “orgasmatron” effect, as an increasing number of people get their sexual satisfaction via the Internet.41 The writer Russell Banks acknowledges this phenomenon in the title of his 2011 novel, Lost Memory of Skin, which “refers to the way real flesh has been supplanted by the virtual kind.”42 Skeptics argue that the emergence of Facebook and other social media, ironically enough, correlates with a marked increase in loneliness.

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See the excellent collection: Saul Levmore and Martha Nussbaum, eds., The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy, and Reputation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 39. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 40. Clifford Stoll, High-Tech Heretic: Reflections of a Computer Contrarian (New York: Anchor, 1999), 200–206. 41. Naomi Wolf has written about this for years. See Naomi Wolf, “Is Pornography Driving Men Crazy,” June 20, 2011, globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/30/is-pornography-driving-men-crazy. See also Peter Nowak, Sex, Bombs and Burgers: How War, Pornography, and Fast Food Have Shaped Modern Technology (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2011), chap. 7. 42.

I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted
by Nick Bilton
Published 13 Sep 2010

It started out as a way to allow academics and scientists to share information, and back then, it was slow and clunky. But even as it began to bring in all kinds of users, there were those who dismissed its use in the same way the monks had shrugged off the printing press. In a classic article in Newsweek in 1995, Clifford Stoll, an astronomer and author, threw cold water on all the dreamy possibilities that the online world seemed to have: “Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries, and multimedia classrooms.8 They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems.”

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.: 1906. 6 Smaller, more portable books: David Finkelstein, and Alistair McCleery, Introduction to Book History, London: Routledge/ Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2007. 7 Early newspaper articles described the television: David Hajdu, The Ten-cent Plague: The Great Comic-book Scare and How It Changed America, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. 8 In a classic article in Newsweek: Ken Olsen reference, Financial World (1976); Clifford Stoll, “The Internet? Bah!,” Newsweek, February 27, 1995. 9 Yet studies show that older technologies … emit stronger electronic waves than WiFi hubs: Series of online articles including: Cyrus Farviar, “UK Doctor Puts the Smackdown on Wifi Fearmongers,” Engadget, December 12, 2006; Richi Jennings, “Wi-Fi Causes Child Cancer?

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History
by Thomas Rid
Published 27 Jun 2016

Computer hackers had become a signature phenomenon of the 1980s, with several high-profile cases making national news.38 In late 1988 the Morris worm emerged, one of the first computer worms on the still nascent internet, and the first to get mainstream media attention. One book in particular influenced the threat perception: Clifford Stoll’s 1989 The Cuckoo’s Egg chronicled how a German hacker breached Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and then sold stolen files to the KGB, Russia’s spy agency.39 In 1991 the Michelangelo virus caused a major scare. Then, in February 1993, an Islamic extremist detonated a huge truck bomb underneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan.

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in Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 109. 111.Morningstar and Farmer, interview, April 24, 2014. 112.Ibid. 113.Howard Rheingold, “Teledildonics: Reach Out and Touch Someone,” Mondo 2000 2 (Summer 1990): 52–54. 114.John Perry Barlow, Lee Felsenstein, and Clifford Stoll, “Is Computer Hacking a Crime?” Harper’s 280, no. 1678 (March 1, 1990): 51–52. 115.Ibid., 53. 116.John Perry Barlow, “Crime and Puzzlement: In Advance of the Law on the Electronic Frontier,” Whole Earth Review 68 (Fall 1990): 47. 117.Michael Alexander, “Secret Service Busts Alleged Crime Ring,” Computerworld, May 14, 1990, 128. 118.Barlow et al., “Is Computer Hacking a Crime?

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Shalikashvili, Joint Vision 2010 (Washington, DC: Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1996), 1. 32.Select Comm. on Intelligence, US Senate, Current and Projected National Security Threats to the United States (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1998), 60–68. 33.Ibid., 68. 34.Winn Schwartau, interview by the author, March 31, 2015. 35.Winn Schwartau, “Fighting Terminal Terrorism,” Computerworld, January 28, 1991, 23. 36.Computer Security: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Technology and Competitiveness of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred Second Congress, First Session, June 27, 1991, no. 42 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1991), 10. 37.Winn Schwartau, Terminal Compromise (Old Hickory, TN: Interpact Press, 1991). 38.Steven Levy, Hackers (New York: Doubleday, 1984). 39.Clifford Stoll, The Cuckoo’s Egg (New York: Doubleday, 1989). 40.Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-war: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993). 41.Bob Brewin and Elizabeth Sikorovsky, “Information Warfare: DISA Stings Uncover Computer Security Flaws,” Federal Computer Week 9, no. 3 (1995): 1, 45. 42.Neil Munro, “The Pentagon’s New Nightmare: An Electronic Pearl Harbor,” Washington Post, July 16, 1995, C03. 43.Roger C.

The Hacker Crackdown
by Bruce Sterling
Published 15 Mar 1992

In 1989, electronic cops and hacker-trackers began using scrambler-phones and secured lines. It only made sense. There was no telling who was into those systems. Whoever they were, they sounded scary. This was some new level of antisocial daring. Could be West German hackers, in the pay of the KGB. That too had seemed a weird and farfetched notion, until Clifford Stoll had poked and prodded a sluggish Washington law-enforcement bureaucracy into investigating a computer intrusion that turned out to be exactly that—HACKERS, IN THE PAY OF THE KGB! Stoll, the systems manager for an Internet lab in Berkeley California, had ended up on the front page of the New Nork Times, proclaimed a national hero in the first true story of international computer espionage.

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Fry Guy had run across "Urvile" of the Legion of Doom on the ALTOS Chat board in Bonn, Germany. ALTOS Chat was a sophisticated board, accessible through globe-spanning computer networks like BITnet, Tymnet, and Telenet. ALTOS was much frequented by members of Germany's Chaos Computer Club. Two Chaos hackers who hung out on ALTOS, "Jaeger" and "Pengo," had been the central villains of Clifford Stoll's Cuckoo's Egg case: consorting in East Berlin with a spymaster from the KGB, and breaking into American computers for hire, through the Internet. When LoD members learned the story of Jaeger's depredations from Stoll's book, they were rather less than impressed, technically speaking. On LoD's own favorite board of the moment, "Black Ice," LoD members bragged that they themselves could have done all the Chaos break-ins in a week flat!

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People?
by John Kay
Published 2 Sep 2015

The notion that all investors have, or could have, identical access to corporate data is a fantasy, but the attempt to make it a reality generates a raft of regulation which inhibits engagement between companies and their investors and impedes the collection of substantive information that is helpful in assessing the fundamental value of securities. In the terms popularised by the American computer scientist Clifford Stoll, ‘data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom’.8 In one of the most bizarre cases of financial wrongdoing ever identified, Ray Dirks exposed fraud at Equity Funding, a corrupt insurance company, in the 1970s. The senior executives of the company went to prison.

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I have written such a book, but a long time ago; Kay, J.A., and King, M.A., 1979, The British Tax System, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 5th edn, 1992. 6. Von Mises, L., 1927, Liberalismus, Jena, Gustav Fischer. Hayek, F.A., 1944, The Road to Serfdom, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. 7. This argument is developed powerfully in Bhidé, A., 2011, A Call for Judgment, Oxford, Oxford University Press. 8. Attributed to Clifford Stoll and Gary Schubert in Keeler, M.R., 2006, Nothing to Hide, Lincoln, NE, iUniverse, Inc., p.112. 9. Though the authorities have discretion not to prosecute, which it is to be hoped they would have exercised. US law, as laid down in the Supreme Court judgement in the Dirks case, requires fraudulent intent; for conviction under European law it is sufficient that the information is price-sensitive – which the fraud certainly was – and that the person knew he was in unauthorised possession of it. 10.

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do
by Brett King
Published 26 Dec 2012

The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works . . . Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.” —Clifford Stoll, Newsweek, 27 February 199516 Or this telling quote from a reformed banker . . . “I thought in rural Tennessee we would not be confronted with Internet banking in my lifetime. I was wrong . . .” —John L. Campbell, CEO of First Community Bank of East Tennessee, 1997 Or this classic prediction from Bloomberg in 2007?

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keyword=Ray+Kurzweil 8 http://www.vice.com/read/ray-kurzweil-800-v16n4 9 Source; BusinessWeek.com (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/bioprinting-the-3d-future-of-organ-transplants-01092012.html) 10 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-11502715 11 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation 12 SonyInsider.com 13 Wikipedia article on Gyricon 14 Geek.com, “Apple has a mightier mouse that needn’t be moved at all”, 5 Oct 2009 15 USA Today, “Digital Sign Revolution”, 11 April 2012 16 “The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana”, Clifford Stoll, Newsweek, 27 Feb 1995 17 Pew Internet Research showed that the fastest growing demographic on Facebook was the above-50 generation (http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Older-Adults-and-Social-Media.aspx) Chapter 10 A Land in the Data Cloud In 2011 Google launched the Chromebook—a laptop that doesn’t contain a conventional hard disk or hard-coded software.

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin
Published 1 Jan 1998

It is impossible to imagine the heights to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter.” What might Old Ben have thought of his heirsʼ accomplishments in a mere quarter of that time? Inevitably, all this gushing hype has led to a backlash. In a recent book, computer scientist Clifford Stoll coined the term “silicon snake oil” to describe the recent ecstatic forecasts about electronic media. Despite his background, Stoll urged skepticism toward the more extravagant arm waving of Net enthusiasts, whose high-tech razzle-dazzle may distract users from building relationships with the real people around them.

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It seemed that expertise in one area—software coding—was not enough to shelter the computer outlaw, who forgot that nearly every security system (including his own) comes equipped with side and back doors. In this case, he guarded the pulse coding of his cell phone but forgot that each unit is a radio transmitter, with its own quirks that can be traced. There are other examples. Clifford Stoll, author of Silicon Snake Oil, also wrote the fascinating Cuckooʼs Egg, about his own experience hunting down a rogue international hacker-spy in much the same way as Shimomura did. As Kevin Mitnick learned, no clever set of masks and false IDs will protect a bright fool who tries to take on the whole world, singlehanded.

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
by Adrian Johns
Published 5 Jan 2010

When hacking in this demimonde sense became a focus of serious police and public attention, it was by virtue of its identification with phreaking. In 1989 a probation office in Florida found its calls being rerouted to a phonesex line in New York. The telephone company investigated, and found that hackers had been not just phreaking its lines, but, in doing so, reprogramming its digital systems. At much the same time, Clifford Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg told the story of a KGBinspired phreaking/hacking espionage ring. And the first largescale online virus (technically, a worm) affected some six thousand networked computers. As they proliferated across the media, such episodes galvanized fears about the vulnerability of online information generally.

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The real expropriation took place long before any hacking was done, and the only way to reveal it was to break rules. “I know I’m doing the right thing,” he declared, “on behalf of others who don’t have my abilities.” In other words, an Internet invasion might be a “manifesto” of public empowerment. This provoked the disintegration of the colloquy. Clifford Stoll, the exposer of the espionage ring, asked drily whether there had once been a “vandal’s ethic.” His point was that electronic neighborhoods were “built on trust,” as real ones were. Hackers eroded that foundation. No community could survive their “spreading viruses, pirating software, and destroying people’s work.”

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live
by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Published 2 Jan 2010

Well, today the car phone is a relic and the iPod is an iPhone with the capacity to store more than 7,000 songs and more than 100,000 other apps. Just fifteen years ago there was no mass adoption of the Internet. We thought this thing called the Web would be some kind of television, but better.3 In an article in Newsweek in 1995, Clifford Stoll wrote, “Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. . . . Baloney.”4 We could simply not imagine the way the Internet would redefine our lives and the opportunities it would create.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly
Published 6 Jun 2016

graphic Netscape browser: Jim Clark and Owen Edwards, Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). not designed for doing commerce: Philip Elmer-Dewitt, “Battle for the Soul of the Internet,” Time, July 25, 1994. “The Internet? Bah!”: Clifford Stoll, “Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana,” Newsweek, February 27, 1995 (original title: “The Internet? Bah!”). “CB radio of the ’90s”: William Webb, “The Internet: CB Radio of the 90s?,” Editor & Publisher, July 8, 1995. Bush outlined the web’s core idea: Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic, July 1945.

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey
by Emmanuel Goldstein
Published 28 Jul 2008

All my computer stuff was carted away in a box and I was not let near it for about two months. Needless to say I was kinda famous when I got back to school. I moved away to a larger town of about 16,000 when I finished school and I did not really think about doing any hacking again until I read about the famous Clifford Stoll and his hunt for the German hacker. By then, I had an old XT and a 286 and was using a comm program called Qmodem. I wrote a script in Qmodem’s script language that did what my old dialer program did for my Atari. I found lots of computers over a period of about a week. Lots were open systems with absolutely no security at all.

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I was royally disgusted by the tone: you defend the actions of computer criminals, for which you misuse and sully the honorable term “hacker” by applying it to them, and wrap it all in the First Amendment in much the same way as George Bush wraps himself in the American flag. Bleech. Whatever the motivations of the cyberpunks (I like Clifford Stoll’s term for them), their actions are unacceptable: they are breaking into computers where they’re not 505 94192c13.qxd 6/3/08 3:34 PM Page 506 506 Chapter 13 wanted or normally allowed, and spreading the information around to their buddies. Their actions cause great damage to the trust that networks such as Usenet are built upon.

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We need to put a handle on the situation before the “security community” gets any ideas on how to further expand their powers past our rights on the backs of the hacker community they demonize to get their way. Why Honeypots Are Not Practical for Everyone The good news is that honeypots are not a true “solution.” The best application for a honeypot is to track an intruder who has already made a home in the system. The most noteworthy case of this happening was documented by Clifford Stoll in his book The Cuckoo’s Egg. Stoll was an admin at Berkeley when he found an intruder using his system to steal secrets. But only an admin who has been around the block a few times and watches his system often can make full use of honeypots. Apart from that, over 90 percent of attacks against a system come from inside, and there is nothing a honeypot can do to stop someone who has internal access from running amok.

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 1 Jan 2000

The Israeli and Japanese governments both have programs to bring hackers into their country, feed them pizza and Jolt Cola, and have them do intelligence work. Other governments go onto the Net and taunt hackers, trying to get them to work for free. “If you’re so good you’ll have the password to this government computer”— that sort of thing works well if directed against a talented teenager with no self-esteem. The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll is about the exploits of three hackers who worked for the KGB in exchange for cash and cocaine. The techniques of national security agencies are varied and, with the full weight of a nation behind them, can be very effective. British communications security companies have been long rumored to build exploitable features into their encryption products, at the request of British intelligence.

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency
by Annie Jacobsen
Published 14 Sep 2015

Noel Sharkey: Emeritus professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, England, chairman of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control Brigadier General Andrew Smith (Australian Army, retired): Former director, Combined Planning Group, Headquarters, U.S. CENTCOM Colonel Edward Starbird (retired): Son of General Alfred Starbird David J. Steffy: Former air crewman, VO-67 Navy Squadron Lieutenant Colonel Hervey Stockman (retired): U-2 pilot, CIA and U.S. Air Force Clifford Stoll: Astrophysicist Robert Surrette: Former senior acquisition executive, CIA Joan Dulles Talley: Jungian analyst, daughter of Allen Welsh Dulles Lieutenant Colonel Troy E. Techau (retired): Former biometrics technologist, Identity Dominance Operations, U.S. CENTCOM Elizabeth Terris: Neuroeconomics researcher, Claremont Graduate University Kip S.

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat
by John P. Carlin and Garrett M. Graff
Published 15 Oct 2018

The team, originally known as the Computer Crime Unit, had been started in 1991 by Robert Mueller, when he had been the assistant attorney general overseeing the criminal division during George H. W. Bush’s presidency. Mueller had been intrigued by the book Cuckoo’s Egg, which had been published in 1989 and told the story of how Clifford Stoll, a computer manager at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, had almost single-handedly identified an intrusion into his network and traced it back to West Germany and a hacker employed by the KGB. The book heralded a new wave of threat and, over time, became a classic. Looking back now, it’s incredible to see how primitive the technology was at the time—the self-assembled Sinclair computers that inspired the West German hackers came with tape cassettes—not even floppy discs—and their dial-up modems plugged along at only 300 bits a second, barely an eighth of the 2,400 bits the primitive dial-up of the 1990s would deliver.

The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan
by Robert Kanigel
Published 25 Apr 2016

“A gem. . . . What Mozart was to music and Einstein was to physics, Ramanujan was to math. . . .” —Clifford Stoll, author of The Cuckoo’s Egg and Silicon Snake Oil EXTRAORDINARY PRAISE FOR ROBERT KANIGEL’S “ENLIGHTENING. . . . a magic, tragic ugly-duckling fable. . . .Ramanujan’s remarkable story comes through. . . .” —The New York Times “The most luminous expression ever of . . . genius interacting with genius . . . I’ve seen nothing to compare with it.” —Hugh Kenner, BYTE “ENTHRALLING . . . one of the best scientific biographies I’ve ever seen.” —Dr. John Gribbin, author of In Search of Shrödinger’s Cat “COMPELLING . . . a work of arduous research and rare insight . . .

Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems
by Heather Adkins , Betsy Beyer , Paul Blankinship , Ana Oprea , Piotr Lewandowski and Adam Stubblefield
Published 29 Mar 2020

While reading it, keep the risk profile of your project in mind—operating a stock exchange or a communication platform for dissidents has a drastically different risk profile than running a website for an animal sanctuary. The next chapter discusses the classes of adversaries and their possible motivations in detail. 1 For more information on error budgets, see Chapter 3 in the SRE book. Chapter 2. Understanding Adversaries By Heather Adkins and David Huska with Jen Barnason‎ In August 1986, Clifford Stoll, a systems administrator at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, stumbled upon a seemingly benign accounting error that led to a 10-month search for someone stealing government secrets from the United States.1 Largely considered to be the first public example of its kind, Stoll spearheaded an investigation that laid bare the specific tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) the adversary used to achieve their goals.