Clifford Stoll: A 75-Cent Error, a Fake SDI Honeypot and a KGB Hacker

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Clifford Stoll, born in Buffalo, New York, in June 1950, worked as assistant chief engineer at public radio station WBFO, studied astronomy at the State University of New York at Buffalo while working in an electronic music lab where Robert Moog mentored him, and earned a PhD from the University of Arizona in 1980 with a thesis on the polarimetry of Jupiter at large phase angles. In 1986, working as a systems administrator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he chased a 75-cent error in the computer accounting logs and found an intruder stealing passwords, taking over accounts and using Berkeley's network to reach U.S. military systems. With authorities unable to help, he spent 10 months tracking the hacker, sleeping under his desk with a pager wired to beep whenever the intruder logged on.

To keep the intruder connected long enough to trace, Stoll built what security experts now call a honeypot: a fake department supposedly tied to the Strategic Defense Initiative, filled with bogus military files. Telecom operators traced the connection through X.25 networks such as Tymnet across the Atlantic to West Germany and Markus Hess, who had been recruited by the KGB. Stoll described the hunt in the 1988 paper "Stalking the Wily Hacker" and the 1989 bestseller "The Cuckoo's Egg." His 1995 book "Silicon Snake Oil" and a Newsweek article predicted that e-commerce would fail and online databases would never replace newspapers. When that article went viral on Boing Boing in 2010, Stoll posted a comment calling it his biggest public mistake. He went on to teach eighth-grade physics in El Cerrito, California.

• Stoll earned his bachelor's degree in astronomy from SUNY Buffalo in 1973.
• In 1986 there was no FBI cyber division, and fraud laws aimed at phone phreaking did not fit a network intrusion.
• The Cuckoo's Egg story became an episode of the PBS science series Nova.
• Stoll holds amateur radio call sign K7TA and appears often on the YouTube math channel Numberphile.
• His Acme Klein Bottle company sells glass Klein bottles online from inventory stored in the crawl space of his Oakland home and fetched by a homemade robotic forklift.