Stoll, Clifford Books

In 1990, in his book The Cuckoo’s Egg, he suggested that automated data mining techniques could be used by Black Hat cyberterrorists to look for interesting patterns in large amounts of non-secure and apparently unrelated data.

Thus, a financial institution may assume that its electronic fund transfer (EFT) system is the most vital information system to protect, but a cyberterrorist may want access to the financial records of only targeted individuals over some period of time. After entry to a system has been gained, the cyberterrorist may not alter data but simply decide to track funding sources (given the deposit records) to harm the targeted individual. In such a scenario, going into the financial institution to destroy information is only a short-term strategy that will do little more than garner too much attention.

Following the popularity of Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg, he wrote a second book entitled Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. Stoll’s home page can be found at http:// www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~stoll/.

See Also: Black Hats; Cyberterrorism.