Book Review of The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage

Cliff Stoll was an astronomer who temporarily worked as a network administrator due to funding shortage at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory(LBL). The first assignment he got as network administrator was to figure out a 75 cents discrepancy in Unix system's user computer usage. His investigation led to the discovery of a foreign hacker breaking into US military computer systems and first fully documented case of computer espionage. As a scientist, Cliff Stoll did an excellent work explaining the technical side of computer hacking without losing the entertaining side of a good story telling, and he also artfully blended in his opinion on network security and privacy. The espionage happend in 1986 and the book was published in 1989, but it doesn't feel outdated reading it today. With recent Edward Snowden case of NSA eavesdropping on US citizens, the book seems ever more relevant.