When, to the delight of the baffled FBI, CIA, and NSA,Cliff Stollnailed his spy, he wound up on the front page ofThe New York Times.The story, broken in 1989, quickly gathered headlines across the nation and Stoll became a genuine, if somewhat unlikely, American hero.An astronomer by training and a computer expert by accident, Cliff Stoll has become a leading authority on computer security, an issue recognized everywhere as among the most important security problems of our times. He has given talks for the FBI, CIA, and NSA, and has appeared before the U.S. Senate. Stoll is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Clifford Stoll is an astrophysicist who wrote The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, a non-fiction work about Stoll's discovery of a hacker accessing sensitive U.S. government networks and then selling the information to the KGB. Stoll has also written Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, a book analyzing the present Internet usage.