Clifford Stoll (or Cliff Stoll) is a U.S. astronomer, computer systems administrator, and author. He received his Ph.D. from University of Arizona in 1980. During the 1960s and '70s, Stoll was assistant chief engineer [1] at WBFO, a public radio station in Buffalo, New York.
Stoll has written three books as well as technology articles in the non-specialist press (e.g., in Scientific American on the Curta mechanical calculator).
Stoll's role in catching hacker Markus Hess in the 1980s, while Stoll was employed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, led to his authoring the book The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage and the authoring of the paper "Stalking the Wily Hacker", published at the magazine Communications of the ACM (May 1988, Volume 31, Number 5, Association for Computing Machinery). Stoll's book was later chronicled in an episode of WGBH's NOVA entitled "The KGB, the Computer, and Me" which aired on PBS stations in 1990.
In his 1995 book, Silicon Snake Oil, Stoll called the possibility of e-commerce "baloney." He currently sells Klein bottles on the Web. He is currently a "mostly" stay-at-home dad. He teaches eighth graders about physics at Tehiyah Day School, in El Cerrito, California. Stoll was a regular contributor to MSNBC's The Site. Stoll is an FCC licensed amateur radio operator, callsign K7TA.