The hero in cracking the fiendish West German spy-ring that was passing passwords to sensitive US and German computers to the Soviet Union in return for cash and drugs – leading to the arrest of programmer Marcus Hess last week, turns out to be astrophysicist Clifford Stoll, then administrator of one of the computer systems at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California: according to the Washington Post, Stoll was intrigued and irked by the fact that his accounts would not add up in 1986, not by a large sum but just by 75 cents of time that no-one claimed; he realised the time must be being stolen, and rigged up the computer to bleep every time an unauthorised access was made, and was thus able to see what the hackers were doing, a year later tracking them to Hanover.
