The Cuckoo's Egg

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I recently finished reading The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll. It is a fascinating non-fictional account of an astronomer turned computer systems manager who, when when investigating a $0.75 accounting error, discovered a hacker had broken into the Lawrence Berkeley Lab computers. The author tells his tale of how he tracked and traced the hacker and how he tried to get the help of the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other government agencies. The things that fascinated me the most were how the hacker was able to easily get into and explore many systems around the world, and how Cliff was able to track the hacker without the hacker knowing that he was being watched.

One big question I had when I started to read this book was about the title. What does computer hacking have to do with the cuckoo? Well, cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds' nests which then are hatched by the other bird which thinks that the eggs are its own. It turns out that the hacker used an exploit in a program that allowed him to place a file anywhere in the computer, even in areas protected by the system that no one should have access to. The hacker used the exploit to change a program that was run every five minutes by the operating system which in turn gave the hacker system privileges. Then, the hacker would change the file back to what it originally was.  Thus, the operating system thought that it was running a routine program, but it was actually hatching the hacker's egg that he planted.

This story also made me think about if anything like this would be possible today. Computer security has come a long way since this incident. I sure hope that nothing at this scale is possible today, but we still have to be careful because there still are people searching for our sensitive information and there are people trying to be malicious who want to infect our computers with viruses and spyware.