Meet Cliff Stoll, the Mad Scientist Who Invented the Art of Hunting Hackers

That fantasy version of Cliff Stoll is hard to make out in the mad scientist, klein bottle-selling Cliff Stoll of today. But, it turns out, underneath 30 years of layered polymath whimsy, the obsessed hacker hunter is still there.

After he finishes giving me a tour of his workshop, Stoll sits me down in his cluttered dining room lined with books, including a full 20-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the first things he says he bought with his Cuckoo's Egg advance. He starts reminiscing, telling a story about his hacker hunting that isn’t in the book.

After Stoll helped German police trace the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s hacker to an address in Hanover, they arrested the intruder—a young man named Markus Hess. The police found that Hess, along with four other hackers, had together decided to sell their stolen secrets to the Soviets.

What he didn’t mention in the book is that he later met Hess in person. When Stoll was called to the German town of Celle near Hanover to serve as an expert witness in the case, as he tells it, he ran into Hess in the courthouse bathroom, coming face to face with the hacker he’d chased online for a year. Hess recognized Stoll, and began asking him in English why he had so doggedly pursued him. “Do you know what you’re doing to me?” Hess asked, according to Stoll’s 30-year-old memories. “You’re going to get me sent to prison!”

Stoll says he simply told Hess, “You don't understand,” walked out of the bathroom, and testified against him. (That telling of events couldn’t be confirmed with Hess, who has no contact information available online and hasn't commented publicly on The Cuckoo's Egg in decades. Even Hans Hübner, one of Hess’ co-conspirators at the time, told me he had no idea about how to reach him. Hübner also noted that his own primary motivation in hacking had always been exploration and technical discovery, not Russian money. He believes Hess, who was given a 20-month suspended sentence for his intrusions, likely felt the same.)

At this point in the story, Stoll becomes silent and his face twists into a pained expression. Slowly, I realize that he’s angry. Then Stoll tells me what he really wanted to tell Hess: “If you’re so smart, if you’re so brilliant, make something that will make the internet a better place! Find out what’s wrong and make it better! Don’t go screwing with information that belongs to innocent people!” Stoll says.

He startles me by pounding his fist on his dining room table. “Don’t think you’re licensed to break into computers because you’re clever. No! You have a responsibility to those who have built those systems, those who maintain those networks, who built the delicate software. You have a responsibility to your colleagues like me to behave ethically.”

This is the other ingredient to Stoll’s hacker-hunting obsession, and the same drive in so many others in the cybersecurity world who followed him—not just curiosity, but a kind of low-burning moral outrage. For Stoll, it seems to stem from a time few other internet users remember, a time before the World Wide Web even existed and when most denizens of the internet were idealistic academics and scientists like him. Before the hackers—or, at least, the criminal and state-sponsored ones—arrived.

“I remember when the internet was innocent, when it crossed political boundaries without a care, when it was a sandbox for intellectually happy people,” Stoll had told me in our first phone call. “Boy, did that bubble burst.”

He never imagined, 30 years ago, that the internet would become a medium for dark forces: disinformation, espionage, and war. “I look for the best in people. I want to live in a world where computing and technology are used for the good of humanity,” Stoll says. “And it breaks my heart.”

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