--Originally published at TC2027 – Surviving CS

Today I’m going to talk about a book, is not a hard topic but I found it interesting because it’s about a hacker, security and passwords.

The Cuckoo’s Egg is a tale of computer hacking and espionage, the author was an astronomer at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, suddenly the money for his department ran out and he had a choice to develop programs for those astronomers who still had grant money or unemployment.

The choice was clear, he started developing a program to keep track of computer usage and almost immediately he discovered a 75 cents error that was assigned to a user who didn’t have a valid address. The real problem was here, the computer at Berkeley were networked to other military and scientific computers. His investigation drew him into a rabbit hole, he involved a lot of three-letter agencies and he had to deal with a lot of bureaucracies.

The threat was real because the hacker could access to sensitive information that could threaten the national security in the USA. Despite that this was published around the early 90’s, the damage a hacker can do and the need for MORE secure passwords is valid today as it was back then.

Probably we don’t have military or scientific secrets but we do have private information that we wouldn’t want compromised. So this tale stands valid today and I can bet it will be valid in the future.