Book review: The Cuckoo’s Egg

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.) ★★★★☆ My server was hacked a few months ago. It wasn’t an obvious “bad password” kind of a situation, but I believe a hole in PHP propped open by some code I wrote 25 years ago. (It’s entirely possible some ancient scripts I wrote for GUIdebook were to blame!) The hacker replaced some of my pages with garish ads for Indonesian casinos, and did some other slight damage. For a few days and nights, I played a cat-and-mouse game with the attacker, learning things, trying the newest patch, only to wake up to see some new pages on my server taken over – up until the moment I managed to close it all off. There were times during those few days when I knew I was patching my server at the same moment as the hacker was breaking it. It was a very strange, unnerving feeling, with some part of me wanting to reach out, have a conversation, generally learn more about them, or maybe also – I’m not going to lie –…