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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

A fun example of a honeypot was that placed by Cliff Stoll in 1986 on a computer system at Lawrence Berkeley when trying to get a repeated attacker to stay on the line long enough to be traced, as described in The Cuckoo's Egg and portrayed in this PBS NOVA recreation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTx9h3Sm29I

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I read this book last year. What a fun read! Well thought out, clever solutions, and a very focused amount of tenacity.

Wait, "stay on the line long enough" was an actual thing? I guess that means shorter calls were free, as they could not be documented/invoiced?

No, it took time to actually trace the call through the exchange(s) and through the Transatlantic communications satellites. I'd recommend you read the book if you are at all interested, it's great.

Interesting. Still wonder how a called could be billed without generating a paper trail that could be used for tracing?

They were billed at the outgoing end, handled at the local exchange for the most part. Handled offline until quite late at a lot of them -- think rolls of paper tapes (later magtape) logging calls, to be read in at the billing office at the end of the month.

You'd still have to know which exchange the call was coming from, to track it that way.

Iirc that was one of the ways they finally got Mitnick back in those days.

hahahah the intro of the video is hilarious

Back in the day if you were watching PBS and saw the WGBH logo you knew it was going to be good.

It's also the reason I will never forget the ZIP Code for Allston.

Everything this guy does is hilarious and entertaining. See later talk about this event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h7rLHNXio8

And he drives RC forklift under his house to store Klein bottles he's selling! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU

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