Reddit reviews The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage
We found 35 Reddit comments about The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
350 pages paperback
>This is just a minor story,
Ummnn...no.
This is not a minor story.
This is what I'd call a "75 cent discrepancy". There's a great book from the 1980's called The Cuckoo's Egg. It tells the story of how tracking down the reason for a 75 cent accounting error on a university computer system led to the discovery of a team of West German hackers breaking into U.S. military and defense contractors' computer systems at the behest of the K.G.B.
I suspect that for many ACONS, the first place where we can sit up and say, "This isn't right. This really doesn't make sense, and it's NOT me," is something seemingly small like this.
Your nmom's whackadoo insistence that you fit into HER mold for you, and the lengths she went to in order to force her version of "reality" onto to not just you, but everyone around you is significantly abusive, involving gaslighting, emotional abuse, and emotional neglect, among others.
It's not cute, and it's not funny. It's enraging. I'm not surprised you're still angry about it. It's the tip of an iceberg...
The Cuckoo's Egg is one of my favorites!
Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo Egg is an absolutely fascinating insight into tracking a computer hacker transnationally. Well worth a read if you like hearing about hacker stuff.
> That's the sad thing, people say "it's the FBI leadership, not the rank and file!" this wasn't Comey and co. This was the rank and file.
A problem, though, is that the leadership generally sets the tone and emphasis of an organization. And since J. Edger Hoover, the primary focus has been political, especially on stuff that generates good publicity. That's why when I was growing up their emphasis and reputation was still based on bank robberies and kidnappings, which are both notorious and particularly easy to solve crimes, because of witnesses in the former, and the need to pick up a ransom in the latter.
If you're into computers, and, heh, this is another "Russia" thing, read The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage. The one organization that wouldn't give Cliff Stoll the time of day in tracking down the West German hackers who were being run by the KFB was the FBI, because the crime didn't satisfy their $100,000 or more threshold.
Hoover did seriously care about counter-espionage, but it was always a red headed stepchild in the organization, and he of course was long gone by then. That the FBI started exerting itself so much about claimed Russian espionage and the like last year just by itself makes it very suspicious, they wouldn't do it without a political angle, which we now can be pretty sure was the "insurance policy" they had in case Trump got elected.
Cliff Stoll doesn't recommend metal openers for his Klein Bottles.
Fun fact: Cliff wrote one of the first investigative books on overseas espionage/hacking in the 1980s "The Cuckoo's Egg" and has a lot of other neat topological glassware on the site.
If you have not read The Cuckoo's Egg, definitely do. In fact you can read pretty much anything Clifford Stoll writes and it's just what you're looking for.
Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll. Well worth $10.
Go get the Verizon DBIR for 2016, and then start reading back issues. Consider also Silence on the Wire which talks about all the ways that information leakage attacks can be launched -- it's really easy to understand. And if you haven't read it yet, The Cuckoo's Egg is one of the first public accounts of a computer system administrator discovering, hunting, and eventually catching a hacker.
The Cuckoo's Egg, by Cliff Stoll: the hackers in that book used this day in and day out.
https://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionage/dp/1416507787
No, this one is a real-life account of how a large (German?) hacker group got caught due to a $.13 (or something like that) account difference in the 80's.
It's probably been 10 years since I read it, so I'm a little rough on the particulars, but it really was a fascinating book, and still ends up being surprisingly relevant to computer security these days.
Edit: was a $.75 error. https://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionage/dp/1416507787
The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition by Thomas A. Limoncelli is a great place to start for mindset. Guess that counts as a "textbook" to you however.
For non-fiction/memoir grab The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage for a great walk-through of what it is like to find an anomaly and track it back to the source and then figure out what to do about it.
In the forward to The Cuckoo's egg Clifford Stoll mentioned his oral defense of his dissertation. At some poiint one of the gravelly old profs said "I only have one question. Why is the sky blue?". So Stoll starts talking about the scattering of the light and get's interrupted "okay, but why?". Before he knew it they were deep into physics and he said it was the hardest part of the defense by far.
TL;DR - Science is hard
Does Cuckoo's Egg ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1416507787?pc_redir=1395427486&robot_redir=1) count? I remember reading this and writing a report on it back in middle(?) school. Made me want to be that one day...
Hackers: Heros of the Computer Revolution
The Cookoo's Egg
Both non-fiction, both excellent. Both cover a unique period in computing history, the understanding of which is worthwhile.
These are not exactly books about computer science, but rather about the various human aspects (both are non-fiction):
The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll. This is about one of the first computer hackers (in the black hat media sense of hacker). The author stumbled onto the intrusion due to a 75 cent billing discrepancy, and went on to invent honeypots and other creative means of tracking the hacker.
The Soul of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder. Written in 1981, it follows two competing teams in a Massachusetts computer company trying to build a 32-bit minicomputer under intense time pressure.
Have you read The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll?
http://www.amazon.com/The-Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Espionage/dp/1416507787
The call he made to the Los Angeles Air Force Base when they were getting hacked bad is one of my favorites. To paraphrase, he was tracking hackers, and they got into LAAFB's computer. He called the duty officer. He told them someone had broken into their computer, duty officer said "impossible, it has a password". And Stoll said "yes, the password is "sysop", the default, it was never changed". The duty officer yanked the connection out of the wall as I recall, or something like that.
If you have not read it, it is a GREAT book, and well ahead of its time, highly recommended.
I can't recommend this book enough: https://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionage/dp/1416507787
This is basically the story of one network admin tracking someone attacking his (and the military's) networks. Takes place in the late 80s. If you'd really like to see a description of the "wild west period of the internet", this is it.
Anyone ever read the book "The Cuckoo's Egg", by Cliff Stoll? It deals with mid-80s cybercrime (true story) but there was something kinda similar to this, where early on he tracked the bad dude down to the country (but didn't realize it yet because the answer initially sounded so ridiculous to him) by figuring how long it took for data to travel.
Fantastic fantastic book. I'm on my second copy--read the first one literally to pieces.
Somebody in another comment mentioned Kevin Mitnick.
In addition to Mitnick's book, I'll also recommend:
Steven Levy's Hackers. It's a classic exploration of the birth of the computer age and hacker culture, with a lot of insights into the mindset of computer people, both white-hat and black-hat.
The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll, which is an account of him tracking down some serious hackers waaay back in the day. It's kind of vintage now, but I remember it being very well written and engaging. It's more like reading a novel than some dry academic piece.
In similar vein is Takedown, by Tsutomu Shimomura, which is Shimomura's account of pursuing and catching Kevin Mitnick. Also quite good, as it was co-written by John Markoff. There's a whiff of Shimomura tooting his own horn in it, but you definitely get a feel for the chase as it was happening, and learn a lot about the details of what Mitnick (and others in the underground hacking world) were actually doing.
Weird fact: I had no idea at the time, of course, but during some of Mitnick's last days before they nabbed him, he lived in an apartment building in my neighborhood in Seattle, right across from the grocery store where I always shopped. And about a year later, I ended up dating a girl who lived in that same building at that time, though of course she had no idea Mitnick was there either or even who he was. Still, I always wonder if I ever happened to stand next to him in line at the grocery store or something like that.
The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll.
The Stealing The Network series is pretty good for a slightly geekier crowd.
The Cuckoo's Egg is pretty old, but a fascinating captivating read even today!
Maybe the typing wouldn't be as feverish, but it's possible to be on the same system as a hacker and try to lock him out or track him. The thing is, this is usually not something you want to do, especially in a corporate environment. Generally, you just want to shut down the affected systems and start clean from backups just because there is far too much damage a hacker can do that would be practically impossible to fully trace. If you want to do forensics, it generally is not done live on the hacked system but from a clean environment looking into the affected system. Again, this goes back to the level of trust you can place on an affected system, which isn't much.
If you want to have a nice and entertaining idea as to what hacker vs sysadmin looks like, read The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Espionage/dp/1416507787/
There is a movie based on the book:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcKxaq1FTac
To put it into Mythbusters terms: Plausible, but not likely.
Hope this helps!
Are they into learning about this stuff? If not, no amount of training material will make a difference. This sort of thing is what got me hooked:
The Cuckoo's Egg
Takedown
The Cuckoo's egg. I started learning unix by trying commands in this book. I haven't seen a lot of similar books since that owning a network series... aparently there was some trouble with the fact that some of them were a little too real. I also haven't really been looking though.
You're not going to want to read things that make you wish you had a computer with you, trust me. You have no idea how many times I have tried to force myself to read stuff like that when traveling or on vacation. Never works. So here's some stuff geared more towards the philosophy of development and programming that will be fun to read and will probably make you want to slow down, relax, and think about the concepts.
And for fun:
> I feel similarly about computer security, in broad terms. The scary thing isn't that "hackers" can do the cyber equivalent of teleporting into your neighbourhood and trying the lock on your front door; it's that we live in a culture where people habitually don't even metaphorically install locks (despite the fact that they're often absurdly effective and trivial in cost), and also the part where people habitually have no understanding of the value of their metaphorical household goods (often many times the value of the property itself).
The book The Cuckoo's Egg is, by the way, an excellent nonfictional account of an early computer security case that has strong echoes with many of the security issues we are facing today. (And is also a damn good read, highly recommended.)
I know it sounds like you're embellishing a bit, but these are all 100% possible depending on what else is on OP's network. All because of a 'tiny little website' and an open ssh port.
Check out The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll, it's a good read.
Here's something similar.
I liked both books a lot.
The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage
Technology related would for sure be The Cuckoo's Egg, and Ghost in the Wires
Not tech related, Junky, American Psycho, and Kitchen Confidential
I would recomend you to read Future Crimes by Marc Goodman https://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Crimes-Digital-Underground-Connected/dp/0552170801?SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&tag=duckduckgo-ffab-uk-21&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0552170801 mostly deals with the non existence of electronic security though and how it is and can be exploited
Information and Corporate security is a very big subject, so it kind of depends where you intend to take your story. But you can start by reading the Wikipedia article about InfoSec https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_security and then see how each area fits into your story and work out from there.
Some realisim in how difficult it can be to track down a hacker, read The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionage/dp/1416507787/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1500888747&sr=1-1&keywords=clifford+stoll very different from what you see in the media
IMHO the most interesting area in Information security is Social Engineering, it requires cunning and skill, and sometimes you can't stop admiring the talents and genius of some of these people. Read Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking https://www.amazon.co.uk/Social-Engineering-Art-Human-Hacking/dp/0470639539/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1500889212&sr=1-1&keywords=social+engineering+the+art+of+human+hacking
Each year Verizon release their data breach report http://www.verizonenterprise.com/verizon-insights-lab/dbir/2017/ it is free to download (don't have to register, just click the download only button) I think that is possibly the best insight you can get into corporate security challenges in 2017
Cuckoo's Egg is a good read, but High-Tech Heretic should be compulsory for anyone doing CS past bachelor's.
I love this book!
https://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionage/dp/1416507787
I don't even want to say anything about it, and spoil the story
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