Soviet intelligence super hacker exposed for just 0.75 USD

In the 1980s, the KGB, the Soviet Union's top intelligence agency, wanted to collect top-secret US military documents through the ARPANET and MILNET networks. They recruited a young German named Markus Hess, who later became one of the most famous hackers of Soviet intelligence, according toListverse.

The KGB's approach and recruitment of Hess was not disclosed; Western counterintelligence forces only knew that this young man had carried out data theft activities from Bremen University in West Germany. Hess had infiltrated a total of 400 US military computers, including many systems in Germany and Japan. The German hacker also guessed the password to the Pentagon's Optimis database, allowing access to a huge amount of classified documents of the US Army.

The KGB reportedly paid Hess tens of thousands of dollars for data and also set targets for the hacker to attack. Hess's sophisticated data collection operation was only discovered by a tiny accounting error in a computer research lab in California in 1986.

Network administrator Clifford Stoll discovered a 75-cent (US$0.75) discrepancy in computer usage charges at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL), which conducts many experiments for the US Department of Energy.

While investigating to find the source of the difference, Stoll realized that an anonymous user had accessed LBL's computer for 9 seconds without paying. Stoll found that this user was a very skilled hacker who had gained system administrator rights by exploiting LBL's security vulnerability.

The American administrator spent 10 months trying to find the mysterious hacker. He got lucky when Hess tried to break into the computers of a defense corporation in Virginia. Stoll recorded all of the enemy's activities and realized that he had access to computer networks at many military bases across the United States, regularly searching for top secret combat data and nuclear weapons technology.

Stoll immediately contacted the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). US counterintelligence discovered that enemy hackers were operating at a West German university, but did not have a specific address.

Stoll and US counterintelligence devised a plan to lure the hacker out by setting up a fake LBL office and spreading rumors that the agency was working closely with the US military. When Hess fell for the trap and tried to access the fake agency's data, US intelligence found his exact home address in Hannover.

At the time, Hess’s form of attack was still very new, making it difficult for the FBI and the West German government to cooperate. Eventually, Hannover police conducted a raid and arrested the German hacker. Hess went to trial in 1990 and was convicted of espionage, but received a suspended sentence of 20 months.

Tu Quynh