Hi, I'm Ryan Levy.

Welcome to Cyber reasons Malicious Life. In March 1986 the annual Se the annual Seibit Expo took part in Hanover, Germany.

At the 4.8 million square meter Hanover fairground,

computer enthusiasts from around the country and Europe and the wider world

gathered together to talk information security.

Later, at an after-hour party party two young hackers where as the Spigel put it quote in a

hashish mode floated an idea to their friends a way to make money of their unique set of skills.

If they broke into certain targets, their argument went, they might find the kinds of information

that could be valuable to a certain buyer.

Not long after some of those young men took a three hour drive west,

entered a wide impressive looking building surrounded by a tall black metal fence,

and struck a deal. 4. 4. 4 decades ago, 3.4. 3.4. three quarters would have gone a lot further than they do today.

With that kind of loose change, you could have picked up some milk from the grocery store or over half a gallon of

gas or a bus ticket. But that doesn't explain why on one fateful day in 1986 a systems administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California

made such an issue over 75 missing cents.

Lawrence Berkeley is a department of energy affiliated lab employing thousands of scientists in cutting-edge research.

75 cents would have made not one iota of difference to anybody, especially because back then computers were so rare and so expensive that to use one of the labs dozen mainframe computers for an hour cost hundreds of dollars.

It added up to thousands of dollars a month, of course.

On this particular month, their thorough accounting system showed a tiny 75-cent discrepancy

between how much time LBL's scientists used the computers and how much they

were built for it, equivalent to just a few seconds of use.

Clifford Stahl, 35 years old, skinny brown hair, shaggy in that Albert Einstein kind of style was only two days on the job

...