Curiosity: Largest prime number

I'm not going to pretend I know anything about math, but I found this curious. Team UCLA discovered a prime number 12,978,189 digits. To get a clue, 7M digits would take 6 WEEKS to write out by hand. They made $100K for breaking the 10M digit record. ($250K for 1B digits) Besides providing entertainment and cash bonuses for mathletes, they're used in encryption and I imagine the larger the number the less likely to be cracked. I hope it's not used for the same purpose as the Enigma Machine.