Someone in Texas exploited a vulnerability in the PageMart paging network this week, sending a flurry of mysterious pages to tiny screens nationwide, confusing subscribers, and swamping the company's customer service center with phone calls.

PageMart said a random discovery enabled the intruder to use a set of pager addressing numbers to send messages to entire groups of customers, rather than individual subscribers. But a security expert said the system may have been hacked.

PageMart spokeswoman Bridget Cavanaugh detailed Wednesday's incident in an email late Thursday. "A person, unknown to PageMart," she said, "discovered that three PINs on our paging terminal in Dallas were actually mail drops." "Mail drops" are used by a paging service to distribute information to many customers at once. It is unclear whether the intruder hacked into PageMart's systems or randomly identified mail drop PIN numbers.

"We suspect this person accidentally discovered this and began sending random messages to our customers," Cavanaugh said. On Wednesday, PageMart customer and San Francisco resident Jeremiah Kelly reported that he received odd messages for a period of about an hour and a half on Wednesday afternoon. Upon receiving one incomprehensible page he suspected a simple "wrong-number" message. "But then, all of a sudden, I got a blitz" Kelly said. Most notable was a recurring message: "There is only one blu bula." Another pair of messages said "Mike, you're Mom drives a Passat."

(c) Wired News