Mersienne crack busted...

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...

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga
-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

Robert Hettinga wrote:
> 
> 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.

Mersenne.

Perhaps the company should be grateful that someone has helped
to spot a hole in security, since the hacker has apparently done
no really serious damages except computing time.

M. K. Shen

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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.

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