Cuckoo's Egg (Clifford Stoll)

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Cuckoo egg. The hunt for the German hackers who cracked the Pentagon. is a non-fiction book by Clifford Stoll published in 1989. It is about his hunt for the hacker Markus Hess , whobroke into military computers in the USA as part of the KGB hack from Hanover .

The original American title is The Cuckoo's Egg . The German translation by Gabriele Herbst was published in 1989 by Krüger-Verlag (today imprint of the publishing group S. Fischer Verlag ). In the meantime, several editions have been printed - including updated new editions with a current afterword by Clifford Stoll.

content

Clifford Stoll works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) as an astronomer , but for lack of work is transferred to the computer department to write programs for his former colleagues. When a billing error of 75 cents is found, Stoll should clear it up in order to familiarize himself with the matter. In fact, Stoll manages to track down a hacker in the LBNL's network and log his meetings using a printer. He witnessed successful and unsuccessful computer break-ins into numerous military computers. Since the FBI has no interest in the case, Stoll turns on the CIA , which is not responsible, and the NSA is officially only moderately interested.

When Stoll realizes that he can trace the hacker's connection, he starts Operation Showerhead: The LBNL is supposedly responsible for SDINET, a network via the Strategic Defense Initiative that the hacker is often looking for. Stoll creates huge files that the hacker regularly downloads. Stoll is tracking these long-term connections with the help of Steve White, an employee of Tymnet , a company through whose lines the hacker crossed the Atlantic. In Germany, Wolfgang Hoffmann from the Deutsche Bundespost helps with the persecution. A big problem is the relatively old switching technology in Germany. Because most exchanges in the USA have already been digitized , a “Malicious Call Identification” can identify a caller in just a few seconds. In Germany, however, a special analog interception circuit has to be set up in the relevant exchange. Identifying the caller takes so many minutes that the original circuit has to be measured once through the entire exchange by a technician. Only after Clifford Stoll provides files that he has manipulated with a large volume of data, which consist of bureaucratic orders from his university in which he has exchanged academic titles or salutations for military ones (Dr. becomes Colonel, etc.), the time is enough for the Federal Post Office to trace the circuit and identify the caller.

The title of the book comes from the fact, reminiscent of a cuckoo's egg , that the hacker who gains access to user accounts on different computers by systematically guessing passwords is using a trick to obtain superuser rights at root level. It uses a configuration error in the Emacs program and thus temporarily replaced a system program that processes certain files at regular intervals. He modified this program so that he gains root privileges as soon as the file is processed again. Stoll describes this process as "hatching the cuckoo's ice".

First editions

  • The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage. Doubleday, New York 1989, ISBN 0-385-24946-2 .
  • Cuckoo egg. The hunt for the German hackers who cracked the Pentagon. translated by Gabriele Herbst. License from Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag . Krüger, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-8105-1862-X .

literature

  • Clifford Stoll: Stalking the Wily Hacker. In: Communication of the ACM. Vol. 31., No. 5, May 1988, pp. 484-500. (PDF; 210 kB)

TV documentary

  • The KGB, the Computer and Me. 1990 (German title: Der KGB, der Computer und ich )

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ The KGB, the Computer and Me in the Internet Movie Database (English)