I recently finished reading The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll. The book is about how an astronomer made computer administrator noticed a 75 cent accounting error which lead to a year long pursuit to trace the error to a group of hackers in Germany (with more devious plans than stealing change.) There are three things to learn from this book that are still valid today: (1) your information is valuable; (2) you are largely responsible for your information’s security; (3) if you suspect a hacker, use the old key chain trick to disrupt him.

The astronomer, Cliff Stoll, worked at Berkley. When he first noticed that somebody was accessing his system under his nose, he wondered why? A hacker should be very disinterested in the astronomical research stored on his system. The hacker was not interested in astronomy; likewise, I doubt a hacker is interested in the source code for my computer science project. What Cliff discovered about the value of his information is valid today. The hacker was interested in what computers were connected to Cliff’s computer, and what user accounts the hacker could use to disguise his actions. In other words, the hacker saw value in Cliff’s computer’s social network. Not all of us store our bank accounts and pin numbers as documents on our desktop, but each computer has valuable resources in networking whether it be email contacts, physical network access, or in providing a relay between the hacker and his eventual destination.

We are largely responsible for the security of our own information. The hacker in this novel used obscure system-level accounts, which have default passwords, that were left for the system administrator to either disable or set new passwords to. At least these system administrators had a manual to disregard. Where is the manual that tells users today that they should use a different password for every account they create? The fact that the password I choose passes password strength filters (e.g. password must include at least one digit and be at least six characters long) doesn’t change the fact that I can easily sign up for an account from a bogus website and provide my name; email; and standard password, and in so doing inadvertently give a malicious Internet con-artist my name, email, and standard password that I use with every other account that I own. If I lose my information because of this, it is not because my computer’s security system failed to protect me; I would have lost my information because I made a human mistake.

One truth revealed in this book will never cease to be true. If you ever need to disrupt a hacker’s connection, simply jangle your keys against the network connector to add noise to his connection. Noisy connections to hackers is like garlic to vampires.