Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Prime time for hackers is over By Richard Thieme. Why hack a US West network to solve a 17th-century math problem? 'Because it's there' just isn't a good enough answer any more.
Oct 27, 1998 | The question hangs in the air like the grin of the Cheshire cat, a koan posed by a 28-year-old programmer sitting in his apartment in Denver. Blosser has a lot more room to stretch out in his place these days, now that the FBI took away his Pentium II (Blosser called it Big Boy), his 486 (Little Boy) and a pile of his CDs. It's all gone, perhaps forever. And so is his job as a computer consultant.
Blosser lost big because he used his client's computers to go on a careless quest for a mathematical grail -- the next Mersenne prime. Ever since Marin Mersenne identified a unique class of prime numbers in the 17th century, digit-searchers have been on the prowl for the next Big One. Their search reached the Internet a few years ago, with the release of Mersenne-hunting software that anyone can download.
Blosser, a systems consultant working for US West, installed it on the company's customer service network in September. He should have known how to configure the software to run in the background, but instead he misconfigured the machines so that they checked for network activity every two seconds instead of every 20 minutes -- flooding the system with packets in the process.
"We noticed a degradation of service at once," says a spokesman for US West. "We respect the pursuit of knowledge, but our workers tend to get irate if the network is not available for work." Thus, while the investigation of the case continues, US West is urging the FBI to prosecute Blosser as quickly as possible.
Like most hackers, Blosser wasn't trying to be bad. He was trying to advance knowledge, solve a puzzle, find out how things work. From Leonardo da Vinci to Dark Tangent, "white hat" hackers have always been driven by a passion for knowledge, not a desire to foul things up. When Blosser loaded the Mersenne program onto the network at US West, he wasn't trying to bring down the network. And he certainly wasn't trying to hide. (His name and e-mail address were all over the software.)
But his hack was unnecessary. The Golden Age of Hacking, which began in the '60s when mainframes at MIT became the Big Toy of a new generation, is over. Kids did this kind of thing when games were cracked using Apple IIs, then sent to friends via slow, acoustic-coupled modems at 300 bauds per second. Laws against unauthorized computer intrusion were all but nonexistent then. The challenges of playing the game and cracking the game were identical.
Today, hackers play the game of life with real money on the table and the credible threat of prison sentences hanging over their heads. Taking over a Baby Bell's network in the pursuit of pure knowledge may sound romantic, but more experienced hackers say it no longer makes much practical sense.
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