Joel,
I searched that link you provided. It does not exist. I searched
ALL of the Washingtion Post's web site for "hacker", "US West",
"Blosser" all of which come up empty. I do not believe this
"article" till I see a valid source.
Alan
Date sent: Tue, 15 Sep 1998 15:29:50 -0700
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Joel Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Mersenne: Hacker Primes
> 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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