Stalking the Wily Hacker

Cliff Stoll

Abstract:

Go back 40 years, when stegosaurs hung out at University and Raymond. Way back to 1986 when you’d find telephone booths on Selby. Yep, those bygone days when people referred to the Internet as “the Arpanet”. One August morning, I discovered a 75 cent accounting error in one of our Unix workstations. Poking through the logs, I discovered a hacker … I began tracking him and, well, a year later, the SOB turned out to be a spy working for the Soviet KGB.

4 decades later, here’s your chance to hear the story from the guy that started it all.

Cliff Stoll

The Cuckoo’s Egg

Cliff graduated from Buffalo Public School #61 with a blue star for good attendance. Later, he became a radio engineer, astronomer, computer jock, and mathematician; he wrote the first book about hacking, “The Cuckoo’s Egg”. Cliff now makes Klein bottles and squeezes lumps of bituminous coal into diamonds.