Clifford Stoll
The Astronomer Who Caught a Spy
The Cuckoo’s Egg
Rating
88Impact score
Domains
Incident responseForensicsWriting
Scouting report
Chased a 75-cent accounting error at Lawrence Berkeley Lab all the way to Markus Hess, a West German hacker selling US military data to the KGB. His logbooks and homemade tripwires invented network intrusion detection by hand, and The Cuckoo’s Egg is still the best on-ramp anyone ever wrote.
Curator’s note
The first documented cyber-espionage case, solved by an astronomer with a printer.
Sources
- 01Clifford Stoll en.wikipedia.org
- 02The Cuckoo’s Egg en.wikipedia.org