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Hailed as "a chilling portrait" by The Boston Globe and "a crafty thriller" by Newsweek, this astonishing story of an obsessive hacker promises to change the way you look at the Internet forever. At Large chronicles the massive manhunt that united hard-nosed FBI agents, computer nerds, and uptight security bureaucrats against an elusive computer outlaw who broke into highly secured computer systems at banks, universities, federal agencies, and top-secret military weapons-research sites. Here is "a real-life tale of cops vs. hackers, by two technology writers with a flair for turning a complicated crime and investigation into a fast-moving edge-of-your-seat story" (Kirkus Reviews, starred). At Large blows the lid off the frightening vulnerability of the global online network, which leaves not only systems, but also individuals, exposed.… (more)
User reviews
Anyway, this is the story of an amateur network intruder who eventually hit so many different sites that he drew the attention of the FBI. He broke into NASA so he could run crack on one of their supercomputers, he broke into Sun and stole the source to Solaris, he broke into roughly 8 million different universities, broke into the dam control system for northern California, etc. But he lived in Portland and so he mostly used dial-up access to Portland State University as his launching point for all of this shit, which puts the system administration team of PSU at the heart of the story.
This was all back in 1990-1991, only a couple of years after the Morris worm and the founding of CERT, back when no one had any fucking idea what time it was about any of this kind of shit.
It's a story totally different from what you might expect. It's not a thriller, it's a tragicomedy. The intruder is completely inept. Janaka catches him and tracks him down to his real life identity almost immediately. The bulk of the book deals with the steadily escalating pile of complaints about the guy from all of the various sites around the country he was hitting, and the resulting bureaucratic struggle within the FBI to get a case actually put together.
Then, when they finally arrest him, they find out he's too physically and mentally disabled for them to want to prosecute.
This is definitely a niche interest book. Outside of people from Portland State with a personal interest in the case, I'd say it might appeal to people who are interested in internet history, or sysadmins with a taste for black comedy.
I gotta be honest, the prose style blows. But the authors (who are professional writers who were not directly involved in the case) have a firm grasp of the tragicomic essence of the story and manage to convey that part of it well. There are a few technical errors but they're petty and not directly relevant to the story and for the most part it does a good job explaining shit like "why you should delete hosts.equiv" for the layman.
It's very much a historical artifact. I mean, they do follow up the account with a 20-page epilogue on the current state of internet security and the issues ahead, but the thing is that was written in 1997 so it's very much a historical artifact itself.