Soviet intelligence super-hacker exposed for just $0.75

In the 1980s, the State Security Committee (KGB), the Soviet Union's top intelligence agency, wanted to obtain top-secret US military documents through the ARPANET and MILNET networks. They recruited a young German man named Markus Hess, who later became one of the most famous hackers in Soviet intelligence, according toSidescape.

The KGB's approach and recruitment of Hess were not disclosed; Western counterintelligence only knew that this young man was involved in data theft operations at the University of Bremen in West Germany. Hess 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 vast amount of classified US Army documents.

The KGB is believed to have paid tens of thousands of dollars to buy data from Hess, and also set targets for the hacker to attack. Hess's sophisticated data collection operation was only discovered by a very small accounting error in a computer lab in California in 1986.

Network administrator Clifford Stoll discovered a 75-cent ($0.75) discrepancy in the billing for computer use at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL), which conducts numerous experiments for the U.S. Department of Energy.

While investigating the source of the discrepancy, Stoll discovered that an anonymous user had accessed LBL's computer for 9 seconds without paying. Stoll realized this user was a highly skilled hacker who had gained administrative control of the system by exploiting a security vulnerability in LBL.

The American administrator spent 10 months trying to track down the mysterious hacker. He got lucky when Hess attempted to infiltrate the computers of a defense corporation in Virginia. Stoll recorded all of the hacker's activities, realizing that he had access to computer networks at numerous military bases across the United States, and was frequently searching for top-secret operational 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 the enemy hackers were operating from a West German university, but lacked a specific address.

Stoll and US counterintelligence devised a plan to lure the hacker into revealing himself by creating a fake department within LBL and spreading rumors that the agency was working closely with the US military. When Hess fell into the trap and tried to access the data of this fake agency, US intelligence located his exact home address in Hannover.

At the time, Hess's method of attack was still very new, making cooperation between the FBI and the West German government difficult. Eventually, Hannover police raided the premises and arrested the German hacker. Hess was brought to trial in 1990 and convicted of espionage, but received only a 20-month suspended sentence.