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75 cents – Would it be enough today?
By Jeremy | February 24, 2010
In The Cuckoo’s Egg, a novice computer administrator enters into a ten month battle with a foreign hacker because of a 75 cent accounting error. The administrator had to verify that the 75 cent discrepancy wasn’t from a software error, but was caused because of the activities of the hacker. The state of software during this ten month battle was very simple in comparison with the state of software today. The simple nature of the software made tracking down the real source of the error easy. Because of the simplicity of the software and the ease of confirming the error, the administrator was positive that there was an outside problem and that the missing 75 cents was not a result of his buggy software.
Proving that the small discrepancy was not an internal problem would be much more difficult today because software has become too complicated. The software of today is, at a minimum, several orders of magnitude more complicated than the software that was used in The Cuckoo’s Egg. Windows now has over 100 million lines of code and Linux has over 12 million lines of code. On top of the operating system’s millions of lines of code, today we add all the web servers, dns servers, firewalls, virus scanners and every other program that is run on a computer of today. When you have so many different programs that are each much more complicated than all of software combined in The Cuckoo’s Egg, assuring yourself that a 75 cent error was not because of some other program on your computer becomes impossible. How can we ever know that somone has been inside our computers if we can’t even track down a 75 cent error?
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