Boots & Sabers

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Owen

Everything but tech support.
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0917, 12 Dec 20

Zodiac Killer’s Cipher Broken After 51 Years

Wow

(CNN)More than 50 years after the so-called Zodiac Killer first began terrorizing the streets of Northern California, a code-breaking team is believed to have finally cracked one of the killer’s mysterious coded messages sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1969.

Dubbed the “340 cipher,” the message was unraveled by a trio of code breakers — David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia, Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian computer programmer, and Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician.
Decoding the cipher revealed the following message. It was sent in all capital letters without punctuation and included the misspelling of paradise:
“I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me
That wasn’t me on the TV show which brings up a point about me
I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradice all the sooner
Because I now have enough slaves to work for me where everyone else has nothing when they reach paradice so they are afraid of death
I am not afraid because I know that my new life will be an easy one in paradice death.”
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0917, 12 December 2020

6 Comments

  1. Charlie Hillman

    Only a tiny wow given the latest technology.

    High school programming classes are now breaking Enigma.

    If you guys want something meaningful to worry about, I’d suggest the recent Chinese advancement in quantum computing. AES 256 will soon be as easy to beat as tic-tac-toe.

    Result? The pricey US military is now officially Goliath.

  2. Charlie Hillman

    Apparently this is not a popular topic among the BSers.

    But, I assume you, Owen, saw that the Treasury, Commerce, and Pentagon were hacked, Google/YouTube were down for an extended period, and one of our mission critical vendors, Digital Ocean, was also down. All today. Probably by Putin. I think this speaks to our incredible lack of cyber preparedness.

     

  3. Owen

    Yep, I saw and have been dealing with it at work. Looks like they found a back door through SolarWinds from an update last June.

  4. Jason

    It was how Fire Eye (used to be Mandiant) was hacked last week. SolarWinds was compromised in a “Supply Chain” attack where malicious code was injected into an update. Its bad, but it’s nothing the US hasn’t done to others as well.

  5. MjM

    …and SolarWinds is used by whom?

    Dominion.

    I wonder what was erased.

  6. dad29

    what was erased

    Neither John Roberts nor Brian Hagedorn gives a damn about that.  It’s “too late” to bitch and moan, ya’know.

    By the way, could this be PRC’s work with a Russki ‘signature’?

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