The Cuckoo's Egg

by Clifford Stoll

“You can hitch a thousand chickens to your plow or one horse. Central computing is expensive because we deliver results, not hardware.”

The hacker didn’t succeed through sophistication. Rather he poked at obvious places, trying to enter through unlocked doors. Persistence, not wizardry, let him through.

In a small town, where people never locked their doors, would we praise the first burglar for showing the townspeople how foolish it was to leave their houses open? After it happened, the town couldn’t ever go back to open doors. Hacking may mean that computer networks will have to have elaborate locks and checkpoints. Legitimate users will find it harder to communicate freely, sharing less information with each other. To use the network, we all might have to identify ourselves and state our purpose—no more logging on casually just to gossip, doodle around, see who else is on the net.

That’s the problem with talking about security problems. If you describe how to make a pipe bomb, the next kid that finds some charcoal and saltpeter will become a terrorist. Yet if you suppress the information, people won’t know the danger.