Hacker accused of using US West computers for math
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.
