Clifford Stohl is truly an eccentric individual. He is an astro-physicist, a true scientist - and sort of a flaky individual. He was working at a university on Physics projects, and his funding ran out....the department heads didn't want to lose this brilliant scientist, so they came up with a way for him to stay on at the school....

They put him in charge of solving a technical problem, which was identifying how some very small amounts of money were disappearing from the cost accounting for the universities computer time.

The amount of money was not significant, a tiny amount of money, but it had become a point of annoyance for the computer people...it was their god given right as technical managers to put a brilliant, flaky, good humored physicist in charge of saving the ten dollars a month that could not be accounted for.

Stohl started with the lengthy process of tracking down exactly where the money was going, and was to discover the difference coming from the accounts of the deceased professors or professors who were out of the country. Whoever was using those accounts was responsible for the small amount of unacounted for money - but who? He found that those accounts were being refrenced from outside of the school....they were being accessed by a dial in computer.

The next thing that our fair detective was to discover was that the users of the accounts were getting in using a super-user password to connect....which was a security level far above what should have been in use by the users that would have been accessing the acounts. Which led our hero on to discovering the program that was doing the damage.

This program would go in through a users email on VAX computers using a particular kind of email, and plant the program in the users email account. The hacker found a way to cause the program to logon on later and establish an account with super-user privileges. Then the user simply dialed in, and logged in using the new account and went about searching. The Cuckoo's Egg title came about because that was how those birds would lay their eggs, in another's nest. After which they would hatch and the other birds would raise the baby Cuckoo. This is how this program worked.

After Stohl figured out the user id problem, he could track down the new id, and then track the movement of the hacker that had been inside...once he had that motion down, he began the physical work of tracking down the modem lines being used for the dial up...and here is one of the truly classic stories of the book....

Stohl took type writers from all over the campus and set one up for each modem line coming into the school, along with ringers and bells...this entailed an awful lot of printers and he had to sleep under a desk and wait for the hacker to try, which eventually he did, and as he did the printers recorded the steps of the hacker.

After he discovered the dial in habits, times and what he was looking for, he started planting some bait for the hacker to chase, phoney secret files on nuclear weaponry, and it was more than the hacker could take, the temptation to keep coming back overwhelmed him. And as the hacker dialed in and chased Clifford's false files,Cliff started tracing the phone lines back, James Bond style. Cliff made friends in the phone company, at computer rooms all over the nation, and he followed the hacker into the FBI, and into the CIA and into the Pentagon. Stohl tracked this hacker for months and months, and eventually traced him across international date lines, and across Europe. The hacker was a german who was selling American secrets to the Russians. But he ran into a persistent scientist...

Stohl has become something of a celebrity from this, but there was no changing him from the scientist that he is.

Recommended: Yes