>> 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.
>
>That sounds like GIMPS.
It was. Primenet even. He's on the primenet top 100 as 'blosser', 10 CPU
years logged.
>> Blosser's alleged hacking was discovered when computers at US
>> West's facility in Phoenix, which normally respond in 3 to
>> 5 seconds, took as long as five minutes to retrieve telephone numbers.
>
>US West keeps it's phone number lists on PCs? Yeah, right.
Nah, but they undoubtably use PCs as terminals to whatever database system
DOES keep the phone number lists.
>> 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.
>
>Sounds like a lot of network traffic to me.
Ah, sounds to me like their system was all FUBAR, and they were looking for a
scrapegoat.
>> 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.
>
>And lept to the unwarrented concluson that the slowdown was related to the
>software. I smell pointy hair.
Yup.
>Unless he wrote his own software that talked to primenet then what he did
>was load Prim95 on 2,585 PCs. Not having permission to do so is wrong, but
>I doubt that had anything to do with the problem US West was having.
He did. He posted here several times about the logistics of deploying to a
wide area net. Trouble is, he had the permission of ONE group (workstation
software support) but not that of the folks running the proxy firewalls or the
corporate security creeps...
