It looks like our friend Aaron Blosser has been running amok again.
This article is from the Washington Post:
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19980915/V000296-091598-idx.html
Next we'll have the FBI shutting down GIMPS.
Joel Smith
Hacker Accused of Using U S West
Tuesday, September 15, 1998; 9:38 a.m. EDT
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.
� Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
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