Daily Archives: May 6, 2014

NSA's recruiting office sent out a mystifying tweet Monday morning, prompting observers to question whether perhaps the agency had sent the nonsense message by accident. But on closer inspection, the tweet turned out to be a code designed to lure in would-be cryptographers though by cipher standards, it's a pretty simple one.

The letters below look at first like they could represent anything. But to the eye of a cryptographer, a few things stand out. See if you can spot them.

The period comes at the end, and each "word" is 12 characters long except those with punctuation. This suggests that the spaces are meaningless, only the letters are in code, and the symbols are being used normally.

In addition, simple analysis of the coded text shows that some letters appear more frequently than others, just as in English and other languages. This suggests the code is a simple "substitution cypher," where each letter is changed for another.

This type of cryptogram is among the oldest and simplest, one version of it having been used by none other than Julius Caesar.

Such simple code can be solved by brute force, using a computer tool to try hundreds of different combinations of letter swaps. It only took six seconds for this Web app to figure out the solution, albeit with a minor error. But half an hour's work would have done it, too: The most common letters in the code (P, C and I) are likely the most common letters in English (E, T and A) as indeed they turned out to be. The message is:

"Want to know what it takes to work at NSA? Check back each Monday in may as we explore careers essential to protecting our nation."

Not quite as disappointing as "Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine," but still not as exciting as people might have hoped. We'll keep an eye on the NSA's Twitter account to see if future coded messages appear this month.

When contacted for more information, an NSA spokesperson wrote in an email to NBC News that the coded tweet is not in fact the first, and is "part of recruitment efforts to attract the best and the brightest."

First published May 5 2014, 1:10 PM

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Code Cracked: Mysterious NSA Tweet Is Decrypted in Seconds

THE UNITED STATES National Security Agency (NSA) has posted a Twitter message in which it apparently asked cryptographers if they want to apply to work there.

The NSA, which has been shaken by Edward Snowden's revelations, put up the coded message over the weekend.

It is pretty obviously a coded message, and we wonder what Snowden might make of it. Twitter users have been trying to crack it, and as you see below at least one Youtube walkthrough is already online.

Most of the NSA job adverts, which come from the @NSAcareers account, make sense to any Twitter user.

This one, though, from late yesterday was markedly different. "tpfccdlfdtte pcaccplircdt dklpcfrp?qeiq lhpqlipqeodf gpwafopwprti izxndkiqpkii krirrifcapnc dxkdciqcafmd vkfpcadf. #MissionMonday #NSA #news," it said, cryptically.

Compared to a normal solicitation for job applicants, it looks very strange indeed.

Szymon Machajewski, of Grand Valley State University's School of Computing and Information Systems said that is a "substitution cipher", and worked backwards from an assumption of what code letter best represents the letter "e".

Machajewski used common online tools, a Javascript method, to crack the code. It took less than eight minutes.

Perhaps disappointingly, the code is not actually a job advert, but a message to come back and check out the NSA job listings on a Monday.

"Want to know what it takes to work at the NSA?" it asked. "Check back each Monday in May as we explore careers essential to protecting our nation."

Read the rest here:

NSA looks to appeal to young cryptographers through coded ads

Orange Room

Brooke Sassman TODAY

2 hours ago

Are you NSA material? On Monday, the National Security Agency published a tweet with jumbled letters that led most followers to believe that it must have been sent by mistake. But it turns out the encrypted message was actually just a part of a new campaign to recruit the "best and brightest" coders to join their team.

"So they were fishing via social media for new employees or people who could be interested in working at the NSA," Tamron explained in the Orange Room Tuesday morning.

Unscrambled, the tweet says: "Want to know what it takes to work at NSA? Check back each Monday in May as we explore careers essential to protecting our nation."

So TODAY decided to put viewers to the test. At 7:17 a.m. we asked you to uncover our secret message in the Orange Room. Within two minutes, responses with the correct answer started rolling in.

Despite Savannah telling Tamron that she would have to leave the message up on the Orange Room screen longer to "give people a fighting chance," many TODAY fans quickly recognized that when rearranged, the letters spelled out, "but first, this is TODAY on NBC."

Although they weren't as quick as our viewers, eventually the anchors got it!

In the end, Willie was happy to know that the message was nothing more than a creative attempt to recruit new employees.

See more here:

TODAY fans decode NSA-inspired Orange Room message faster than Natalie, Savannah