00:00Did you know a 75-cent billing error helped bring down a KGB spy ring?
00:04In 1986, Clifford Stoll was a newly hired sysadmin at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
00:10He wasn't a spy hunter. He was just trying to balance the books.
00:13But that tiny discrepancy wouldn't add up, so he started digging.
00:17What he found was an unauthorized user quietly moving through the network,
00:21jumping from system to system, tunneling deep into classified U.S. military computers through ARPANET.
00:26Stoll set a trap. He built a fake file full of convincing but false information and waited.
00:32He tracked connection times using a printer that clattered out logs in real time.
00:36He cross-referenced phone bills by hand. He called the CIA, the FBI, the NSA.
00:42They weren't interested, so he kept going alone for nearly a year.
00:46Eventually, the trail led to Hanover, Germany, and a hacker selling access to Soviet intelligence.
00:52The agencies finally listened. Arrests followed in 1989.
00:55Stoll never set out to invent threat hunting. He just refused to ignore 75 cents.
