The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

A real-life cyber detective story, The Cuckoo’s Egg is the gripping account of how one man uncovered an international espionage ring by chasing down what began as a 75-cent accounting error.

Clifford Stoll, an astronomer turned systems administrator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the 1980s, noticed a small discrepancy in computer usage logs. That tiny error led him to discover an intruder inside the lab’s systems. This intruder, known by the alias “Hunter,” had broken into U.S. networks and was stealing military and national se…