In 1995 Ian Goldberg and David Wagner (then computer science PhD students at the University of California–Berkeley) showed that a clever malicious agent could produce a list of possible random seeds small enough that a computer could check them all in a matter of minutes, rendering the encryption useless.* Netscape had previously turned down offers of help from the security community but, after the work of Goldberg and Wagner, they patched the problem and released their solution to be independently scrutinized by anyone who wanted to go through it with a fine-code comb.
