The Cuckoo's Egg

by Clifford Stoll

“Or you could just chase the bastard. Run faster than him. Faster than the lab’s management. Don’t wait for someone else, do it yourself. Keep your boss happy, but don’t let him tie you down. Don’t give them a standing target.”

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 physics, this is correlation analysis. If you see a solar flare today and tonight there’s a bright aurora, chances are that these are correlated. You look at things that occur close together in time, and try to find the probability that they’re somehow connected.

Saved by my logbook.

“Any system can be insecure. All you have to do is stupidly manage it.”

The more I thought about it, the more impressed I was with the military people. They’d zeroed in on the weak points of my talk, and understood both the details and importance of what I’d said.

No doubt about it: the shoemakers’ kids are running around barefoot.