The Cuckoo's Egg

The Book in 1 Sentence

$0.75 error spawns a year long international cyber espionage investigation by a hippie astrophysicist.

Brief Review

Cliff Stoll tells an absurd story of how an accounting error lead him into the world of computers well beyond what he knew. His story telling is a great blend of intriguing, technical, and with nice breaks to discuss the items going on in his personal life.

Why I Read this book

This book was recommended to me when I first started my career in cyber security. However, I didn't read it for the first time until a couple years ago (I wasn't a big reader back then) and have now reread it for the second time as I continue to find books to recommend for those that I mentor.

In-Depth Review (Favorite Quotes)

This is such an interesting story. Something so benign lead to the investigation of a lifetime. It is still something that is studied and replicated in training environments. The ability back in the day to traverse networks around the world with minimal effort is crazy to me. I mean it still can be done, but not that easy. Cliff talks about passwords needing to be 6 LETTERS long. I haven't had to set a password that is less than 8 characters and any work item has had to be something in the range of at least 12 characters.

I digress from the shop talk and go back to the book. He does a great job of telling the woes of a multi-department investigations, investigations dealing with 3 letter agencies especially in the early 80s before the numerous reorganization by No-such-agency and the CIA (Lots of other books have talked about these). Having done this a couple times it is very difficult since the idea of sharing is still something people don't want to do in an effort to make them more important and to claim more funding.

Another thing he really does well is talking through all the evidence he found. While typically this can be VERY droll, he layers to events with the importance of the targets so well that you want to dive into all the different layers.

How my life / behavior / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.

This books really reminds me of the thrill of the investigation. That search for the 5 W's is always so satisfying to figure out. As I have been working with a client on LLM things, I would like to move back to managing a team that does this type of investigations. To watch the big picture.

Rating

I really liked this investigation and writing. It is a fun story that turns highly technical data to simple information that isn't highly technical and so it makes it worth the read whole heartedly. What takes it down a couple notches that while I appreciate the completeness of the story, about 4/5 of the way through it gets repetitive. While it is accurate to the story it could be condensed. I found this to be an 8.

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