NSA Wants You!

The NSA has sent out a confusing message via their recruiting Twitter account earlier this week, where only the brilliant or those with an eye for a puzzle would be able to “get it”. Some folks who took a look at the account probably thought that (ironically) the account had been hacked, or someone updated the account by accident through a series of seemingly random touches on a virtual keyboard. Actually, the message was a cryptogram that read, “tpfccdlfdtte pcaccplircdt dklpcfrp?qeiq lhpqlipqeodf gpwafopwprti izxndkiqpkii krirrifcapnc dxkdciqcafmd vkfpcadf. #MissionMonday#NSA#news”

Professionals would not have found it to be too challenging to figure the entire shebang, where after translation, it reads, “”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.”

The tweet in question happens to be a substitution cipher, where each individual letter is swapped for another. The code itself will see each ‘word’ being twelve letters long, unless there happens to be a punctuation hanging around. This means the letters alone would determine the code, and it has proven to be one of the oldest as well as easiest of cryptograms to solve. Interesting way of recruitment, don’t you think so?

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: nsa, Twitter