Cliff Stoll

Many people think we're on the verge of another Cold war, a cyber war, in which skilled hackers will break into systems abroad and wreak havoc with them. But back in the 1980s, such a concept was still such a noveltythat intelligence agencies and police didn't pay much attention to it. That is, until 1986, when an astronomer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory made a startling discovery. Cliff Stoll was a systems administrator at the lab, and noticed an unusual pattern of usage in the lab’s computer network. In a groundbreaking game of cyber cat and mouse, stole eventually traced the activity back to a KGB recruit in Germany named Markus Hess. Stoll told the amazing story in his 1989 bestseller The Cuckoo's Egg. I spoke with him about that book, and again a year later when they paperback version came out.