The Cuckoo's Egg

Odd one. The hunt for the German hacker who cracked the Pentagon. is a non-fiction book published in 1989 by Clifford Stoll. It is about his hunt for the hacker Markus Hess, who broke under the KGB hack from Hannover in military computers in the United States.

The original American title is The Cuckoo 's Egg and has been translated by Gabriele autumn. Was published in the German translation in 1989 in the Kruger Verlag ( now part of the publishing group S. Fischer Verlag). Meanwhile, several editions have been printed - also updated revisions with a current afterword by Clifford Stoll.

Content

Clifford Stoll is working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ( LBNL ) as an astronomer, but is displaced in the absence of work in the computer department, where he is to write programs for his former colleagues. Is as an accounting error of 75 cents found Stoll should apprise that to get familiar with the matter. Indeed, Stoll manages to track down a hacker in the network of LBNL and record its meetings each case by means of a printer. So he becomes a witness for successful and unsuccessful computer break-ins in numerous military computers. Since the FBI has no interest in the case, Stoll switches the CIA, which has no jurisdiction, however, and the NSA is officially only moderately interested.

As Stoll is clear that he can trace the connection of the hacker, it starts operation Showerhead: The LBNL is allegedly responsible for SDINET, a network of the Strategic Defense Initiative, after which the hacker often examined. Stoll creates huge files that the hacker downloads regularly. This long-term connections Stoll tracked with the help of Steve White back, an employee of Tymnet, crossed over the lines of hacking the Atlantic. In Germany helps Wolfgang Hoffmann of the German Federal Post Office in the prosecution. A major problem is the relatively old switching equipment in Germany. Because most exchanges have already been digitized in the U.S., there can determine a caller a " Malicious Call Identification " in just a few seconds. In Germany, however, a special analog capture circuit in the relevant exchange has yet to be established. Identifying the caller takes so many minutes, as the originating circuit must be measured by the total exchange time of a technician. Only after Clifford Stoll he tampered files, providing large volumes of data, which consist of bureaucratic arrangements of his university where he exchanged the academic title or styling in military ( Dr. becomes Colonel, etc. ), the time for the federal post office is sufficient to trace the circuit and identify the caller so.

The book's title comes from the reminiscent of a cuckoo fact that the hacker gained access to user accounts by systematically guessing of passwords on different computers, with a trick gets superuser privileges at the root level. He uses a configuration error in Emacs program and replaced so short a system program that handles specific files on a regular basis. This program, he changed from so that he gains root privileges as soon as the file is processed again. This procedure describes Stoll with " Hatching Kuckuckseis ".

First editions

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