A profile of Cliff "Cuckoo's Egg" Stoll, a pioneering "hacker hunter"

Cliff Stoll (previously) is a computing legend: his 1989 book The Cuckoo's Egg tells the story of how he was drafted to help run Lawrence Berkeley Lab's computers (he was a physicist who knew a lot about Unix systems), and then discovered a $0.75 billing discrepancy that set him on the trail of East German hackers working for the Soviet Union, using his servers as a staging point to infiltrate US military networks.

The book is superbly written and fascinating, and it inspired a generation of cybersecurity practitioners (I referenced it in my 2008 novella The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away). Stoll himself is charming and curmudgeonly, the author of early tech-skeptic titles like 1995's Silicon Snake Oil, and he is the proprietor of the Acme Klein Bottle company, which sells the hand-blown Klein bottles (basically a Mobius Strip extruded into the third dimension) that he makes (he also makes ones you can drink out of, called "Klein Steins"). I've given Acme Klein Bottles to friends and family as gifts and they're always well-received.

I had the enormous pleasure of meeting Stoll this year at Atlseccon in Halifax, and he was every bit as funny and interesting in person as you could have asked for.

Writing in Wired, Andy Greenberg offers a candid, personal profile of Stoll at his home in Oakland, whose cellar is filled with boxes of Klein bottles that Stoll retrieves with a homemade robotic fork-lift.

Stoll's work in the Cuckoo's Egg affair presaged many of the common tools used by security pros today, like the ubiquitous "intrusion detection system," as well as "honeypots." Read the rest