Clifford Stoll Tracked KGB Hacker

The first known case of state-sponsored hacking was uncovered in 1986 by Clifford Stoll, an astronomer working as a system administrator at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. While investigating a $0.75 discrepancy in computer-use accounts, he discovered an intruder and spent nearly a year tracking his movements across military and government networks. The intruder was Markus Hess, a West German hacker whose associates sold stolen information to the Soviet KGB. Stoll's investigation marked an early milestone in digital forensics, later chronicled in his 1989 book, The Cuckoo's Egg.

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