"To create encryption keys, RSA uses two huge prime numbers and
multiplies them together to produce an even bigger prime."
-- Sandeep Junnarkar, CNET News.com August 9, 2002
facepalm
This must be some kind of journalist meme... :-)
It's like a complex Sudoku puzzle, you probably wouldn't understand...
Genuinely made me laugh. I always crack a smile when I see someone use the "you probably wouldn't get it" cop-out (yes, I realise you're making a mockery of the concept) to avoid explaining something that they evidently don't understand either. I seem to see this fairly often in large, complex fields like mathematics or complex systems programming from people who either have an agenda or are trying to bullshit their way through a job for which they're under-qualified.
According to http://www.onlineconversion.com/prime.htm, the number 845145127 is not prime since it has the factor 503. So the sentence should read "By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new number...".
The "huh" is that if you multiply any two non-one numbers together, the result can not be prime since the two input numbers are factors of the resultant number.
A simple explanation is that the journalist is over-simplifying a source which said "...found a semiprime".