One of the first big hacking stories from the early days of the internet is decribed in this book. Cliff Stoll worked at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories when he started a 1 year hunt for a german hacker in August 1986. He traced the hacker over a 1200 baud  line (good old days!) which printed every keystroke of the hacker on a matrix printer, following unnoticed his every step. Interesting was the struggle to get one of the US agencies (FBI, NSA, CIA, Air Force OSI) interested in this case, while the hacker wormed his way through military and public servers. The carriers Tymnet and Deutsche Bundespost (Datex-P) were more forthcoming. Only as the KGB tried to get information through a Bulgarian proxy agent the agencies finally reacted and the hackers got arrested in Germany by the BKA. More information about the hacker on german wikipedia. Further interesting viewpoints from the nsa in the cryptolog magazine (internal nsa magazine which has just now become unclassified; cryptome mirror). Interestingly enough the US of A had privacy laws some years ago.

This is a very good book that shows in a compelling story typical attack vectors that are still used on a now daily basis on the internet.