News Summary

• A researcher’s social media post that revealed how to break part of a popular encryption protocol has gone viral.
• But did he really do it with just “good old paper and pencil”?
• Eric Lu sparked worldwide excitement and confusion by posting a sequence of 130 digits on X (formerly Twitter) The reason for the uproar over some seemingly innocuous numbers lies in the two words that followed them: “divides RSA-260.” Lu, an engineer at the artificial intelligence start-up Cognition, has managed to factor one of the so-called RSA numbers.