An Astronomer Hunts a KGB Hacker
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2025
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
September 10, 1986. It’s just before 8am when Cliff Stoll’s pager jolts him awake. A computer at Lawrence Berkeley Lab has flagged a problem: a tiny 75-cent accounting error. But when Stoll rushes to his office, he realizes this isn’t about missing spare change. Someone has slipped into the lab’s network, tunneling thousands of miles away into U.S. military computers.
Cliff isn’t a spycatcher. He’s an astronomer. And yet, from this moment on, he’ll spend months chasing a hacker who may be working for the KGB.
How did spare change uncover a spy ring? And why did this case mark the end of innocence on the Internet?
Special thanks to Cliff Stoll, astronomer, teacher, and author of The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage; and J.J. Widener, cybersecurity expert currently serving as Director of Cybersecurity Architecture at Kimberly-Clark.
Artwork: Cliff Stoll promo image
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, original podcast. |
| 0:06.6 | History this week, September 10, 1986. |
| 0:12.9 | I'm Sally Helm. |
| 0:16.6 | It's 751 a.m. |
| 0:19.9 | A.m., a quiet morning in Berkeley, California. |
| 0:24.8 | Cliff Stoll wakes up. |
| 0:28.3 | His pager is ringing. |
| 0:31.1 | For a while now, he's been monitoring the computer system at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, |
| 0:36.5 | where he works as a systems administrator. |
| 0:39.2 | His main concern is keeping the computers running 24-7 so that scientists at the lab can use |
| 0:44.7 | them for research. |
| 0:46.3 | But today, he's on a different mission. |
| 0:51.8 | He's tracking a computer user who has been breaking into the network, a hacker. |
| 0:58.0 | Cybersecurity isn't his job. |
| 1:00.2 | In fact, the term hasn't even been invented yet. |
| 1:03.6 | Regardless, Cliff is on the case. |
| 1:07.1 | He's not sure what this hacker is up to. |
| 1:10.0 | Could be harmless, but he wants to find out. |
| 1:12.6 | And today, his beeping pager tells him that hacker is back. |
| 1:18.6 | Stoll heads to his office at the lab. |
| 1:21.6 | And there, he learns that when the intruder logged in this time, |
| 1:26.6 | they used a connection in the |
... |
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