The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking A Spy Through The Maze Of Computer Espionage Quotes
"Me, a wizard? Until a week ago, I was an astronomer, contentedly designing telescope optics."
"Lucky for me that my laboratory recycled used astronomers."
"Still, a computer wizard? Not me—I’m an astronomer."
"Managers occasionally wore ties, but productivity went down on the days they did."
"The scientists using the computers were supposed to see a simple, powerful computing system, as reliable as the electric company."
"Might as well have been classical Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit."
"Only a fool would poke around such a labyrinth without a map."
"A real wizard would have solved the problem in a few minutes."
"Most of his sentences ended with acronyms, this one meaning, 'Read the fucking manual.'"
"In front of me, the first few feet of the printout showed the cuckoo preparing the nest, laying the egg, and waiting for it to hatch."
"Life was full: no hacker is worth missing a Dead concert for."
"The astronomer’s rule of thumb: if you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen."
"Viruses are the creatures that haunt programmers’ nightmares."
"As super-user, the hacker could infect our system in a way that would be almost impossible to eradicate."
"Maybe he’d planted a logic bomb—a program timed to blow up sometime in the future."
"We couldn’t. Trying to shut him out wouldn’t work, as he’d only find another way in."
"Most of all, we needed to know who was at the other end of the line."
"It’s gotta be some student on the Berkeley campus," I said to Roy. "They’re the Unix wizards, and they think of us as bozos."
"Detecting the hacker was easy: I’d just camp out in my office alongside two terminals."
"The perfect afternoon was to tinker around the house, rewiring a switch, planting some bulbs, or soldering a stained glass window."
"Living together was different. We were both free."
"We needed to weave a net fine enough to catch the hacker, but coarse enough to let our scientists through."
"I didn’t have time to figure out the difference—within a minute, he was bound to install his program in the systems area, and start it running."
"Deliver a gift that looks attractive, yet steals the very key to your security."
"Sharpened over the millennia, this technique still works against everyone except the truly paranoid."
"I wasn’t at the lab to watch, but the printer saved three pages of the hacker’s trail."
"When money was stored in vaults, safecrackers attacked the combination locks. Now that securities are just bits in a computer’s memory, thieves go after the passwords."
""So what? Somebody’s always had control over information, and others have always tried to steal it. Read Machiavelli. As technology changes, sneakiness finds new expressions.""
"No matter. Is he going to stay on much longer?"
"There’s no shortcut to hand stitching a quilt. Each triangle, square, and parallelogram must be cut to size, ironed, assembled, and sewn to its neighbors. Up close, it’s hard to tell the pieces from the scraps. The design becomes visible only after the scraps are discarded, and you stitch the pieces together."
"In the world of computing, the Internet is at least as successful as the interstate system. Both have been overwhelmed by their success, and everyday carry traffic far beyond what their designers dreamt."
"As long as there are software wizards and gurus, Dennis won’t be satisfied with the distribution of computing power."
"Our software is fragile as well—if people built houses the way we write programs, the first woodpecker would wipe out civilization."
"Like Einstein’s universe, most networks are finite but unbounded. There’s only a certain number of computers attached, yet you never quite reach the edge of the network."
"Each regularly inspires complaints of traffic jams, inadequate routes, shortsighted planning, and inadequate maintenance. Yet even these complaints reflect the phenomenal popularity of what was an uncertain experiment only a few years ago."
"If anyone finds out there’s a hacker at Livermore, heads will roll."
"My job is to run a computer. Not to catch criminals. Leave me out of your wild goose chase."
"Stop acting like a crusader, Cliff. Why don’t you look at this as research."
"Dead ends are illusory. When did you ever let a ‘Do Not Enter’ sign keep you away from anything?"
"Permission, bah. Funding, forget it. Nobody will pay for research; they’re only interested in results."
"That’s easy for you to say. But I’ve got to keep three managers off my back."
"Don’t try to be a cop, be a scientist. Research the connections, the techniques, the holes."
"From basic physics, I conclude that the hacker lives on the moon."
"Absolutely zero. We don’t pry into domestic affairs. Period."
"No, but maybe there’s a directory of high school math teachers."
"It’s the luck of the draw. Sometimes you get the elevator ..."
"The only way to solve the problem was to tell everyone who might be able to help."
"I’m not sure. I know his name is Knute Sears."
"I’d managed to show that on weekdays he showed up from noon to three P.M.; on weekends he’d show up as early as six A.M."
"For all I knew, someone within a few blocks was playing an elaborate practical joke on me."
"I need to talk to Ron right away. He’s got to make a panic network trace right now."
"Are you saying that the hacker is coming from abroad?"
"There’s a whole world of computers, yet he’s targeting Army bases."
"Something serious is going on—it would be a long time before I found out what."
"I could imagine the far end of that long connection."
"Most of the time, he found the doors and windows locked."
"Like a post office running at the speed of light, special software grabs each envelope and tosses it to a node nearer its destination."
"To him, the network's elegance lay in its simplicity."
"I hadn’t realized that he didn’t have a whole switchboard at his fingertips."
"Germany. I ran over to the library and dug out an atlas."
"I didn’t return home until 2 A.M. Martha waited up, piecing a quilt."
"But the connections are lousy, there’s no use in talking long distance."
"All day long, secret agencies were asking details from me, but nobody ever told me anything."
"I wondered if my gut feeling was wrong: could I just be chasing some poor sophomore prankster?"
"But not a dime of support. My salary was skimmed from astronomy and physics grants, and lab management leaned on me for systems support, not counterespionage."
"Cliff, we’ve decided to call it quits," Roy Kerth said. "I know you’re close to finding the hacker, but we can’t afford it anymore."
"How about another two weeks. Until New Year’s Day?"
"Damn. Three, nearly four months work down the tubes. And just when the trace seemed promising."
"Frustrating. The hacker could hide, but he couldn’t shake me. My management was the only one who could do that."
"I began planning how to pull every user’s password. It’s easy to do—just rebuild the password file."
"You can’t do that," the FBI agent said. "We’re opening an investigation."
"If it’s worth doing, do it for yourself, not to please some funding agency."
"They’re finally taking us seriously," Roy said.
"Serious enough to pay our overhead?" "Are you kidding?"
"Was I following some sophomore, home on vacation?"
"If this wasn’t a student, then why did he come from two places in Germany?"
"The only way to find out was to keep watching. Quietly."
"I was never much for dancing, but by two o’clock or so, I found myself jumping and spinning around with Martha, lifting her high in the air…"
"Huh? The hacker was at work on New Year’s Day? Give me a break."
"Hacker or not, we would celebrate the New Year."
"If you don’t document it, you might as well not have observed it."
"Compiling this profile should have kept me out of trouble for a few days. But trouble came from another front."
"His first command was to show what privileges he’d garnered."
"I could imagine him sitting behind his terminal in Germany, staring in disbelief at the screen."
"Somewhere in Germany, the hacker tickled the eastern end of the connection, unaware that we were zeroing in on him."
"But someone was plugging up the communications downstream of Mike Gibbons."
"Chuck’s Bevatron computers calculate that "right distance." They control the accelerator too, so that the correct energy is used."
"The hacker wasn’t just poking around a computer. He was playing with someone’s brain stem."
"Get either of these wrong, and you’ll kill the wrong cells."
"He couldn’t know that he was caged in. My alarms, monitors, and electronic tripwires were invisible to him."
"From his viewpoint, everyone except us detected him. In reality, almost nobody detected him. Except us."
"I wondered if the hacker realized that he was under my thumb."
"I could sense in which category he thought my case belonged."
"Remember, Cliff, that the FBI only works cases that the Department of Justice will prosecute. Since no classified information’s been compromised, there’s no reason to commit the resources that it’ll take to resolve this."
"Every month we get a half-dozen calls saying, ‘Help! Someone’s breaking into my computer.’ Ninety-five percent of them have no records, no audit trails, and no accounting data."
"Isn’t the FBI or the CIA doing something, now that there’s foreigners and spies? I mean, aren’t they the G-men—Truth, Justice, and the American Way?"
"Because I want to know what happened. Who’s behind it. What they’re searching for. Research."
"If you insist on pursuing this case, the FBI can assist under the domestic police cooperation act. Your lab should contact the Berkeley District Attorney and open an investigation."
"Probably some middle management at the FBI. They can catch kidnappers easier than computer hackers."
"This guy’s broken into thirty computers around the country, and you’re telling me that it’s a local, Berkeley problem?"