The Cuckoo’s Egg - Hatching the Computer Espionage Plot

Computer espionage has touched menacing levels threatening the e-enabled world. Ashish Kuvelkar recommends ‘The Cuckoo’s Egg’ as compulsive reading for those who want a taste of the real life experience of Cliff Stoll in following the trail of a hacker.

‘The Cuckoo’s Egg’, a New York Times bestseller for more than four months is an exciting true story of the author’s efforts in tracking a spy through the maze of computer espionage. The author, Cliff Stoll unravels the intrigue of tracking a hacker who broke into computer systems in the US, in his book ‘The Cuckoo’s Egg’.

An astronomer by profession, Cliff Stoll moved on to become a system administrator at Lawrence Berkley Laboratory (LBL) by sheer providence. While going through the computerized accounting system he was administering, he found that a month’s bill showed a 75 cent shortfall. In locating the source of this error, he stumbled upon an unauthorized user on his system, who was using the computers at LBL to launch attacks on computer systems of the US military and to steal sensitive security and military information. Hence, the name "The Cuckoo’s Egg".

In the book, Stoll has documented in great detail the modus operandi of the hacker and how the hacker was tracked across various computers and telephone networks spread across continents. He has tried to reconstruct the incident as he experienced it. His interaction with the top US counter intelligence agents and their apathy towards a sensitive issue shows that red-tapism is a global phenomenon.

The story is set in the late eighties and takes the reader down memory lane where mainframes and super mini computer systems were connected over plain telephone lines with minimal network security.

Not only does the book contain fascinating, lively and thoroughly absorbing elements of a thriller, it also creates awareness of the holes in computer security. The language used is simple and computer jargon explained lucidly. ‘The Cuckoo’s Egg’ should appeal to the layman as much as it would to a computer professional.

The Cuckoo’s Egg, 356 pages,  Published by The Pocket Books, ISBN 0-671-72688-9 Price USD 6.99.

Fascinating Facts About the Book of Life

(Human Genome Project)

Compiled by - Dr. Rajendra Joshi

• The publicly funded multibillion dollar Human Genome Project and private company Celera Genomics put aside their conspicuous bickering on Monday, June 26, 2000 and made the joint announcement that each had sequenced and mapped the nuclear DNA of Homo sapiens.
• Completion of cracking the human genetic code - a 10-year effort involving thousands of scientists worldwide - is considered at par with the achievement of man landing on the moon. However, the moon project did not have a direct impact on lives of mankind. The genome project is predicted to change lives in the form of new personalized medicine.
• The nucleus of every cell in the body contains genetic material that consists of two tightly coiled DNA strands or double helix that would stretch about 6 feet if uncoiled and hold 30,000 to 140,000 genes that define a human being.
• The genetic code is a compilation of 3.5 billion letters that scientists call the Book of Life, if printed in a newspaper would fill 151,910 pages each with 23,040 genome characters and create a 42-foot high stack of folded newspapers at the newsstand. Or the length of the code in miles is 4,049.
• It would take about 9.5 years to read out loud (without stopping) the complete bases in a person’s genome sequence. This is calculated on a reading rate of 10 bases per second, equaling 600 bases/minute, 36,000 bases/hour, 864,000 bases/day, 315,360,000 bases/year.
• To crack the code, supercomputers at Celera Genomics performed 480,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations.
• Alterations in our genes are responsible for an estimated 5000 clearly hereditary diseases, such as Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis, and sickle cell anemia, and influence the development of thousands of other diseases. Decoding the human genome will lead to new ways to prevent, diagnose, treat, and cure disease.
• Genetically, we human beings are 99.9% similar to each other and 99% similar to chimpanzees.
• Generations of scientists will spend most of the next century interpreting the code’s meaning and learning to play it on computers in increasingly complex ways that will lead to treatment of most human diseases.
• Now, scientists will be able to use the working draft of the human genome to alert patients that they are at risk for certain diseases, reliably predict the course of disease, precisely diagnose disease and ensure that most effective treatment is used and develop new treatments at the molecular level.