The Cuckoo's Egg

Executive Summary: A truly excellent and fascinating tale of hacking in the early days of the internet.

Full Review
I'm fascinated with computer crime. I have for as long as I can remember being interested in computers. Somehow I had never managed to read this book.

I'm glad I finally got around to it. It might be my new favorite. Cliff Stoll tells an engaging and personal story of his discovery of computer networks, security exploits and computer crime that reads more like a spy novel than a technical manual.

I think Mr. Stoll does a good job of making things easy to understand for the non-technical person. It has just enough detail to follow the story without being overwhelming. Of course being a computer person myself, I may not be the best to judge how technical this book gets.

This book overlaps with some other stories of computer crime I've read and re-sparked my interest in reading some others I have on my backlog, along with rereading one I read back in high school that seems to overlap with this one a bit.

It's hard for me to judge how non-techies will enjoy this book, but anyone who wants to see what things were like in the early days of the internet should find this fascinating.

The most remarkable thing was how little the various law enforcement agencies seemed to care. It was really the wild-wild west of computer crime. To the FBI, unless they physically stole something, destroyed something or cost your millions of dollars, it wasn't worth pursuing.

How do you quantify computer time? Especially back then when computers weren't affordable and resources were limited. What about the time Cliff Stoll spend tracking the hacker? Time he should have spent doing his job. Everyone wanted him to keep at, and to keep them in the loop, but no one was willing to do anything about it, or cough up funds to support him.

It would take a few more years and some bigger crimes to finally wake them up and change how computer crime ranked in importance. Then again, most people are inundated with malware, spyware, viruses, scams and phishing emails on an almost daily basis. So in some ways it feels like nothing has really changed. You're not going to call the FBI because someone tried to steal your password.

Computer crime is big business these days, and if you want to see how it was in the early days, this is a must read.