If anyone has been following the Certicom encryption contest, read the article below about how it was finally cracked.

Article here

The deal was that Certicom (an wireless encryption company) challenged hackers, crackers, scientists, mathmeticians, and anyone that wanted to try, to attempt to crack their encryption code.

It took something like 550 days and 10,000 computers, but someone broke it and won the prize of $10,000 -- which wasn't enough considering how long it took. The person didn't even completely break it, they just broke the first part of it.