‘The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage’ is a 1989 book written by Clifford Stoll, an astronomer turned systems administrator of the computer center of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) in California. It is his first-person account of the hunt for a computer hacker who broke into a computer at the lab.
In August of 1986 his supervisor asked him to resolve a US$0.75 accounting error in the computer usage accounts. He traced the error to an unauthorized user who had apparently used up nine seconds of computer time and not paid for it, and eventually realized that the unauthorized user was a hacker who had acquired root (high-level) access to the LBL system by exploiting a vulnerability in the movemail function of the original GNU Emacs (an open-source computer program that moves a user’s mail to another file).
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The Daily Omnivore 