Summary Of Cuckoo's Egg: A Review?

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For this final paper, I would like to discuss the historical failures that came into light when Mr. Clifford Stoll (the author of “Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a spy through the Maze of Computer Espionage” book) stumbled upon a $ 0.75 accounting error and the revelations that followed, its potential findings, risks and costs associated and why it is important to address and fix those security holes. Cuckoo’s Egg is an interesting read and the author was successful in presenting to his readers the picture of beginning of Internet days (arpanet, then), network practices then. Despite of the fact that this book describes a real incident that in 1980’s, some of the findings are relevant and torment us even today.
One of the major historical failures that comprised security is the UNIX operating system (with GNU Emacs installed) at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories and other military laboratories. UNIX operating systems were widely being used by a vast number of computer professionals and research scientists back in those days. Though the operating system cannot be categorized as completely insecure, I believe that the default settings (which eventually helped the intruders to take advantage of this) are one of the main failures that lead to other events mentioned in the book.
However, I feel users had a different vision/perspective on security mechanisms and they trusted each other during those times and did not have to worry about protecting their information (this is how exactly, one person’s ignorance becomes another’s person’s - hacker, here bliss). This book helps us to understand the vulnerabilities; its impacts and why it is important to address/ fix those holes.
Like i already mentioned...

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... for real time monitoring purposes, create alerts, and auditing purposes as well as tools to analyze the log information. Such tools help us a great deal in forensic analysis. It is a welcoming change that organizations realize the importance of auditing computer system activities as well.
Compared to past, today we have sound security policies, established cyber laws, active monitoring systems, and extra layers of security in form of firewalls etc., to prevent access to uninvited guests for your network and most importantly increased user awareness. But still there exist vulnerabilities in and around the cyber space of which the hackers exploit for different purposes. The monetary losses we suffer today are much greater in magnitude as well as in mass. But, we definitely are in a better place compared to the time the events in this book took place.

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