arnaud@angate.att.com (Alain Arnaud) (10/16/89)
I picked up a new book over the week-end, titled "The Cuckoo's egg or Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage". It is by Clifford Stoll, and the publisher is Doubleday. Here's a synopsis of the write-up on the inside flap. "For months a computer intruder moved through a maze of American military and research computers like an invisible man - until Clifford Stoll saw his footprints. Over a year later, to the delight of the baffled CIA, FBI and NSA, Stoll nailed him, and wound up on the front page of the New York Times. With all the supense of a classic spy novel. Clifford Stoll was an astrophysicist turned Unix systems administrator at Lawrence Berkeley lab when his discovery of a 75-cent accounting error alerted him to the presence of an unauthorized user on the system. Instead of simply expelling the intruder, Stoll let him wander through the system while carefully rewcording every keystroke. Thus began a year of stalking an elusive, methodical hacker who was prowling the nation's conputer network, (Arpanet, Milnet...) using numerous techniques- from simply guessing passwords, to exploiting software bugs in gnu-emacs, to setting up bogus programs, to gain umauthorized access to American computer files on several military, government and academic computer systems..." Excellent book, a real page turner with lots of details on Unix systems and the Internet. This book is as good if not better than Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of the Machine". Alan Arnaud Std Disclaimer + Just a consultant Guest Account: arnaud@angate.ATT.COM Permanent Account: uunet!ecla!arnaud