Indeed a great book.

And (tiny spoiler-alert): a small easter-egg (though not intended as such) for people on HN: the founders of HN/YC show up in the book, admittedly in a very minor capacity.

Btw, I recently discovered that Cliff Stoll is one of the awesome guys who appears on the Numberphile YouTube channel, so if you watch that, know that it's him :)

Including this one posted this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7GYYerlQWs

Any time the subject of Cliff Stoll comes up, I always comment that someday I want to be as excited about _something_ as Cliff Stoll is about _everything_.

His TED talk is probably my all time favourite. https://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything

Second this. Fantastic book about true events. If you like the story, there is also a movie which covers the same events as the book. The movie is called "23" and is available in German and English.

I know the movie as 'The KGB, the computer, and me': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcKxaq1FTac

Thanks for this, just started watching it now!

Oh wow, didn't realize there was a book behind "23". BTW, there's a terrible American film with the same name - one wants:

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/

not this here rubbish: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0481369/ (hm, really it was with Jim Carrie? Maybe there's yet another terrible version. Or maybe this was just that bad).

My favorite bit was jangling his keys to induce noise in the line to delay the hacker long enough for a trace.

This. Cliff Stoll is better known for his other book, where he got a bunch of predictions about the internet wrong, but Cuckoo’s Nest is a lot better read. Based on a true story, how a few cent $ difference led him to discover a massive hack going on, and how he was chasing the hacker.

The OG of true crime hacking books.

Yep, this one is a great read!

Fantastic book!

Second this.