Cliff Stoll, the mad scientist who invented the art of hunting hackers

Re:Cliff Stoll, the mad scientist who invented the art of hu... by gdy on Thursday December 19, 2019 @05:24AM (#21833575)

With all due respect to Cliff Stoll, I'm perplexed by the "Don’t go screwing with information that belongs to innocent people!" bit.

Seriously, the article is talking about German hackers intruding military targets:

"the hacker’s intrusions to the Department of Defense’s MILNET systems, an Alabama army base, the White Sands Missile Range, Navy shipyards, Air Force bases, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, defense contractors, and the CIA"

"Stoll’s hacker-tracking work at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs inspired its sister institution, Lawrence Livermore National Labs"

This is where nukes are designed.

And after that "Don’t go screwing with information that belongs to innocent people!", "You have a responsibility to your colleagues like me to behave ethically", "low-burning outrage", "[the Internet] was a sandbox for intellectually happy people".

Innocent, ethical, intellectually happy people creating means to murder hundreds of million people and pesky hackers who have no right to be snooping around.

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Re:Cliff Stoll, the mad scientist who invented the art of hu... by marksweston on Thursday December 19, 2019 @08:11AM (#21834558)

> pesky hackers

...working on behalf of the KGB, seeking military advantage for the totalitarian police state they served. Yes, let's be on their side instead.

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Re:Cliff Stoll, the mad scientist who invented the art of hu... by gdy on Saturday December 21, 2019 @04:25AM (#21850503)

"As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy."

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Re:Cliff Stoll, the mad scientist who invented the art of hu... by C1sc0cat on Thursday December 19, 2019 @08:58AM (#21834896)

I think Cliff was referring to "his" systems here, as a recovering system we get protective of our babies.

I remember joking that you had better hope that you got caught in order by: the local police; The Met; The service (MI5); internal security rather than me :-)

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Re:Cliff Stoll, the mad scientist who invented the art of hu... by ajmarsh on Thursday December 19, 2019 @09:21AM (#21835094)

The systems Cliff Stoll was responsible for at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs were part of the Human Genome Project, not a weapons program.

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