

"Can you identify who's breaking in?"

"One guy uses the pseudonym Hagbard. Another, Pengo."



Update August 2016: Here's an amazing video of the author showing off his self-built warehouse of Klein bottles including self-built trash warehouse robotI've seen this book pop up a few times on lists like "recommended reads for programmers" and always wondered why - I didn't know it was such a extremely fascinating read! I tried to read it in one evening but had to stop at 4am.It's the story of how one US astronomer turned computer programmer ("astroinformatician"?) found a 75 cents bill for computing time he couldn't make sense of, how he traced that bill, found an intruder on his system, and how it took him months to untangle the web of systems the hacker used to disguise himself.Stoll had a very interesting scientific way in which he approached the problem of an intruder, which resonated with me strongly: he kept neat lab-books of everything that happened, he thought clearly about each step, and all the little details they used to infer more about the hacker are splendid.For example, on login the hacker kept on using "ps -eafg" to see who was logged in, but "-f" was superfluous under Berkeley Unix, which indicated that the hacker was used to AT&T Unix, which wasn't used on the US West Coast. Therefore it was more likely that the intruder was from the US East Coast, or from abroad.(Another fun thing about the age of this book - it's clearly written for the layman in 1989, so things that are completely basic today are explained in long terms - "electronic mail", for example)It becomes a fun cat and mouse game - it's always the same intruder (who turned out to be (view spoiler) ), Stoll tried to get the US government involved, but no agency wanted to have anything to do with it - neither the FBI, nor the CIA, nor the NSA had anything to do with computer break-ins, there were no laws yet, nothing (the events in this book happen around 1986-87, I was just a few months old).It's great fun to read how each step in the plan worked out, how Stoll laid traps, each step in his thinking is detailed (the joys of writing everything down!).You'll especially love this if you (like me) grew up fascinated with German "hacker culture" of the late 80s, early 90s, back when the Chaos Computer Club started to become a name. I got the biggest smile from this little dialogue:I'm pretty sure every German "computer person" knows who hagbard was. We've all seen the movie "23", and if you haven't, you greatly owe it to yourself, it's one of my favorite German movies (even Robert Anton Wilson, who co-wrote "Illuminatus!", has a small part playing himself). It portrays the KGB hacks from hagbard alias Karl Koch and his friends, which is closely connected to the story of this book, but the movie focuses on Koch, while the book focuses on the systems Hess broke in. I guess focusing on Koch made for a more interesting story - he had a relatively large cocaine habit, and he was found burned to death, with no suicide note.Stoll didn't like the CCC at all - in the book he repeatedly calls them vandals, I guess because back then, it was just a couple of kids messing around, not particularly knowing what they were doing. Nowadays the CCC advises the German government on technical security matters. The Chaos Communication Congress is one of the best and biggest technology conferences in Germany (I'm proud that I once held a little talk there at an ungodly hour together with Bastian Greshake /@gedankenstuecke).Another interesting side-note is that some currently very famous "computer people" appear shortly - such as Paul Graham and Robert T. Morris, who have since then founded several companies and are now known for ycombinator, one of the biggest Internet startup seed funding companies (possible more for ycombinator's social news site, Hacker News If you want to read a more technical side of this, Stoll first published a paper: Stalking The Wily Hacker I wonder how much the events in this book, and the book itself, made Snowden's revelations possible... Would the NSA ever have started to try and control the entire Internet if the Soviet Union had never started to pay hackers for information?Recommended for: Computer people, those interested in the history of the Internet, those who enjoyed playing UplinkNot recommended for: People who want to think that the Internet is Facebook