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Clifford Stoll | |
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Born | Clifford Paul Stoll Jr. June 4, 1950 Buffalo, New York, U.S. |
Other names | Cliff |
Alma mater | SUNY Buffalo (BS) University of Arizona (PhD) |
Call sign | K7TA (previously WN2PSX) [1] [2] |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Astronomy |
Thesis | Polarimetry of Jupiter at large phase angles (1980) |
Doctoral advisor | Martin Tomasko |
Clifford Paul "Cliff" Stoll (born June 4, 1950) is an American astronomer, author and teacher.
He is best known for his investigation in 1986, while working as a system administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, that led to the capture of hacker Markus Hess, and for Stoll's subsequent book The Cuckoo's Egg , in which he details the investigation.
Stoll has written three books as well as articles in the non-specialist press (e.g., in Scientific American ) on the Curta mechanical calculator and the slide rule, and is a frequent contributor to the mathematics YouTube channel Numberphile .
Cliff Stoll attended Hutchinson Central Technical High School in Buffalo, New York. He earned a B.S. in Astronomy in 1973 from the University at Buffalo (SUNY). While studying for his undergraduate degree at SUNY Buffalo, Stoll worked in the university's electronic music laboratory and was mentored by Robert Moog. [3]
He received his PhD from the University of Arizona in 1980.
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During the 1960s and 1970s, Stoll was assistant chief engineer at WBFO, a public radio station in his hometown of Buffalo, New York. [4]
In 1986, while employed as a systems administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Stoll investigated a tenacious hacker—later identified as KGB recruit Markus Hess—who stole passwords, pirated multiple computer accounts, and attempted to breach US military security. After identifying the intrusion, Stoll set up a honeypot for Hess, eventually tracking him down and passing details to the authorities. It is recognized as one of the first examples of digital forensics. At the time, gaining cooperation from law enforcement was a challenge due to the relatively new nature of the crime. [5] He described the events of his investigation in The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage and the paper "Stalking the Wily Hacker". [6] Stoll's book was later chronicled in an episode of WGBH's NOVA titled "The KGB, the Computer, and Me", which aired on PBS stations in 1990. [7] [8]
In his 1995 book Silicon Snake Oil [9] and an accompanying article in Newsweek , [10] Stoll raised questions about the influence of the Internet on future society, and whether it would be beneficial. He made various predictions in the article, such as calling e-commerce nonviable (due to a lack of personal contact and secure online funds transfers) and the future of printed news publications ("no online database will replace your daily newspaper"). When the article resurfaced on Boing Boing in 2010, Stoll left a self-deprecating comment: "Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler ... Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff ..." [11]
Stoll was an eighth-grade physics teacher at Tehiyah Day School, in El Cerrito, California, [12] and later taught physics to home-schooled teenagers. [13] Stoll was a regular contributor to MSNBC's The Site . Stoll is an FCC licensed amateur radio operator with the call sign K7TA. [14] He appears frequently on Brady Haran's YouTube channel Numberphile. [15]
Stoll sells blown glass Klein bottles on the internet through his company Acme Klein Bottles. [8] [16] He stores his inventory in the crawlspace underneath his home in Oakland, California, and accesses it when needed with a homemade miniature robotic forklift. [17] [18] [19]
A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hacker – someone with knowledge of bugs or exploits to break into computer systems and access data which would otherwise be inaccessible to them. In a positive connotation, though, hacking can also be utilized by legitimate figures in legal situations. For example, law enforcement agencies sometimes use hacking techniques to collect evidence on criminals and other malicious actors. This could include using anonymity tools to mask their identities online and pose as criminals.
In mathematics, the Klein bottle is an example of a non-orientable surface; that is, informally, a one-sided surface which, if traveled upon, could be followed back to the point of origin while flipping the traveler upside down. More formally, the Klein bottle is a two-dimensional manifold on which one cannot define a normal vector at each point that varies continuously over the whole manifold. Other related non-orientable surfaces include the Möbius strip and the real projective plane. While a Möbius strip is a surface with a boundary, a Klein bottle has no boundary. For comparison, a sphere is an orientable surface with no boundary.
The Morris worm or Internet worm of November 2, 1988, is one of the oldest computer worms distributed via the Internet, and the first to gain significant mainstream media attention. It resulted in the first felony conviction in the US under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It was written by a graduate student at Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris, and launched on 8:30 p.m. November 2, 1988, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology network.
Karl Werner Lothar Koch was a German hacker in the 1980s, who called himself "hagbard", after Hagbard Celine. He was involved in a Cold War computer espionage incident.
John Thomas Draper, also known as Captain Crunch, Crunch, or Crunchman, is an American computer programmer and former phone phreak. He is a widely known figure within the computer programming world and the hacker and security community, and generally lives a nomadic lifestyle.
Judith Milhon, best known by her pseudonym St. Jude, was a self-taught programmer, civil rights advocate, writer, editor, advocate for women in computing, hacker and author in the San Francisco Bay Area.
John Wallace Walker was an American computer programmer, author and co-founder of the computer-aided design software company Autodesk. He was later recognized for his writing on his website Fourmilab.
23, original German title: 23 – Nichts ist so wie es scheint is a 1998 German drama thriller film about young hacker Karl Koch, who died on 23 May 1989, a presumed suicide. It was directed by Hans-Christian Schmid, who also participated in screenwriting. The title derives from the protagonist's obsession with the number 23, a phenomenon often described as apophenia. Although the film was well received by critics and audiences, its accuracy has been vocally disputed by several witnesses to the real-life events on which it was based. Schmid subsequently co-authored a book that tells the story of the making of 23 and also details the differences between the movie and the actual main events.
The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage is a 1989 book written by Clifford Stoll. It is his first-person account of the hunt for a computer hacker who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).
Markus Hess is a German hacker who was active in the 1980s. Alongside Dirk Brzezinski and Peter Carl, Hess hacked into networks of military and industrial computers based in the United States, Europe and East Asia, and sold the information to the Soviet KGB for US$54,000. During his time working for the KGB, Hess is estimated to have broken into 400 U.S. military computers. The hacked material included "sensitive semiconductor, satellite, space, and aircraft technologies".
A security hacker or security researcher is someone who explores methods for breaching defenses and exploiting weaknesses in a computer system or network. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, such as profit, protest, information gathering, challenge, recreation, or evaluation of a system weaknesses to assist in formulating defenses against potential hackers.
Nahshon Even-Chaim, aka Phoenix, is a convicted former computer hacker in Australia. He was one of the most highly skilled members of a computer hacking group called The Realm, based in Melbourne, Australia, from the late 1980s until his arrest by the Australian Federal Police in early 1990. His targets centred on defense and nuclear weapons research networks.
The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities, including Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), Carnegie Mellon University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It was published in paperback form in 1983 as The Hacker's Dictionary, revised in 1991 as The New Hacker's Dictionary.
Joshua Klein is a technologist who uses systems thinking to create alternative methods of succeeding in divergent fields. He is most widely known for his project designed to train crows to fetch lost change, but has also used this method to write three books, participate in several startups, work for the US Intelligence Community, and speak at conferences such as Davos and TED.
Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway is a 1995 book written by Clifford Stoll where he discusses his ambivalence regarding the future of how the internet will be used. He wrote the book at a time when he felt the promise of the internet was being over-hyped: "I'm mainly speaking to people who feel mystically lured to the Internet: lotus-eaters, beware. Life in the real world is far more interesting, far more important, far richer, than anything you'll ever find on a computer screen." Stoll later acknowledged that the book was a mistake.
A cuckoo's egg is a metaphor for brood parasitism, where a parasitic bird deposits its egg into a host's nest, which then incubates and feeds the chick that hatches, even at the expense of its own offspring. That original biological meaning has been extended to other uses, including one which references spyware and other pieces of malware.
Cyber Partisans is a Belarusian decentralized anonymous activist/hacktivist collective emerged in September 2020, known for its various cyber attacks against the authoritarian Belarusian government. The group is part of the broader Belarusian opposition movement.