The Cuckoo's Egg is a 1989 nonfiction book by astronomer-turned-systems-administrator Clifford Stoll, detailing his real-world investigation into Markus Hess, a hacker who breached Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's systems in 1986 by exploiting a vulnerability in GNU Emacs. The book is considered a foundational text in cybersecurity, documenting one of the earliest known cases of computer espionage traced to a foreign intelligence service.
Background
The Cuckoo's Egg chronicled the first major computer intrusion investigation linked to the KGB and helped popularize the term 'cuckoo's egg' as a metaphor for malware — a parasitic program that tricks a host system into carrying it, much like a cuckoo bird lays eggs in another species' nest.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Sep 30, 2026 at 04:48 PM
- Score
- 6.0 / 10