On a note to your reply to UberC0der, I can answer the question of how they wrote to you. 10 to 1 it was an echo to your pty which, unless your login is the same as your name (hence jason), points more and more to someone who knows you (or did a lot of homework). Doesn't make sense because of already stated points of the box being up only a few hours, nothing's on the box really worthwhile, etc...

If it were a write to your account, you would have seen something like this:

Message from root (ttyp1) [ Fri Jan 04 08:34:15 ] ...
This is root, sending you a message...
<EOT>

Also, wtmp is a binary file, so just 'cat'ing it won't work (you'll get tons of garbage. Same thing for utmp and btmp. The way to find out what kind of format a file is in is to use 'file <filename here'. It'll tell you if it's data, if it's an executable, what kind, ascii, etc...