-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In <v04011718b2244f17bc80@[139.167.130.246]>, on 09/15/98 at 01:11 PM, Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com> said:

Somebody evidently installed the Mersienne(sp?) prime search client on 2000+ AT&T machines.

The local talk station news has a report that they have just been apprehended and will be prosecuted for it.

Interesting times, indeed...

It was US West's computers: DENVER (AP) -- A 28-year-old computer expert is accused of hacking into the U S West computer system and diverting more than 2,500 machines that should have been helping answer phones to his effort to solve a 350-year-old math problem, according to documents filed in a federal court. Aaron Blosser also allegedly obtained the passwords to 15,000 U S West workstations and sent much of the coded material he found in them onto the Internet, according to an FBI search warrant served at his Lakewood, Colo., home last Wednesday. The warrant says Blosser, a contract computer consultant who worked for a vendor that was hired by Denver-based U S West, is under investigation for computer fraud. In a telephone interview with The Denver Post, Blosser said he has not been charged with any crime and said he made no money from his unauthorized use of U S West computers. He also failed in his mathematical quest: the search for a new prime number. ``I've worked on this (math) problem for a long time,'' said Blosser. ``When I started working at U S West, all that computational power was just too tempting for me.'' Blosser enlisted 2,585 computers to work at various times during the day and night and quickly ran up 10.63 years of computer processing time in his search for a new prime number. U S West spokesman David Beigie called the hacking ``unprecedented'' in company history. ``It would be virtually impossible to do it from the outside,'' he said. Blosser's alleged hacking was discovered when computers at U S West's facility in Phoenix, which normally respond in 3 to 5 seconds, took as long as five minutes to retrieve telephone numbers. The computers were so slow in mid-May that customer calls had to be rerouted to other states, and at one point the delays threatened to close down the Phoenix Service Delivery Center. On May 27, U S West's Intrusion Response Team found a software program on the system that ``captured U S West computers to work on a project unrelated to U S West Services,'' according to the search warrant. The anti-hacking team traced the software to a terminal at the company's Littleton offices, where they found Blosser, a self-described ``math geek.'' Blosser allegedly showed agents how he remotely installed software on computers throughout the U S West system and reprogrammed them to search for a new prime number. - -- - --------------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://www.openpgp.net Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. OS/2 PGP 5.0 at: http://www.openpgp.net/pgp.html - --------------------------------------------------------------- Tag-O-Matic: Get OS/2 - the best Windows tip around! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3a-sha1 Charset: cp850 Comment: Registered_User_E-Secure_v1.1b1_ES000000 iQCVAwUBNf63Bo9Co1n+aLhhAQEkswP+N+DQE6WhuZtk1pCjUfo08BvAd4W38Anl nekwRyzeK2j3MsXx86UgN3/rj2O0BteRBGwV8PQlNududI7MNU2L/qtL+3ZBJKrI yLBqk3wvYBTn/VzoS/83kge0nVIAx2YTJCt+NSzE5O29oEabIPmruxCZH2Mj14pb eAOVYNJOPY4= =Vv1U -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----