How the NSA-led US Cyber Command Wishes You a Happy Valentine's Day (twitter.com) 88
Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: The U.S. Cyber Command, headed by the National Security Agency's director, has been a part of America's Department of Defense since 2009.
Today this unified combatant command wished its followers on Twitter a happy Valentine's Day, adding "As our gift to you, we present 12 crypto challenges designed by the information security community.
"Love is in the air, find it if you can. #BeOurValentine #cryptochallenge #VDayGifts."
They shared a link to the official U.S. Cyber Command Valentine's Day 2021 Cryptography Challenge Puzzles.
There are 12 tricky puzzles in all — 3 .jpgs, 6 .pngs, 2 .mp3s and a .bmp file — and I couldn't solve a single one of 'em.
Each one has a hint — though that hint is just the number of words in the answer, as well as its number of characters.
Today this unified combatant command wished its followers on Twitter a happy Valentine's Day, adding "As our gift to you, we present 12 crypto challenges designed by the information security community.
"Love is in the air, find it if you can. #BeOurValentine #cryptochallenge #VDayGifts."
They shared a link to the official U.S. Cyber Command Valentine's Day 2021 Cryptography Challenge Puzzles.
There are 12 tricky puzzles in all — 3 .jpgs, 6 .pngs, 2 .mp3s and a .bmp file — and I couldn't solve a single one of 'em.
Each one has a hint — though that hint is just the number of words in the answer, as well as its number of characters.
A gift from the NSA (Score:1)
Well, it is a PDF file, (Score:2)
which is the next best thing, coming from NSA and all.
Recruitment tool? (Score:3)
... always looking for a few good men ^H people.
Re:Recruitment tool? (Score:4, Insightful)
Please don't advertise for the NSA, an agency notorious for illegally fucking over US citizens and mass unconstitutional surveillance.
You are promoting terrorism, Slashdot.
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Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
I guess that's what we're doing this week. Okay everybody, we're going to help AC stop beating his wife by doing it for him.
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"not supporting literally the US Gestapo... = supporting Hitler" now...
They say the North Koreans are brainwashed, but seriously ... idiots like you take the cake.
You don't need a dictator, because your are all doing the oppressing yourselves! They managed to make you WANT to hit yourselves.
I'm not even mad, that's amazing!
Re: Recruitment tool? (Score:5, Funny)
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Oddly, that is only true if you are calling outside of the nation or calling other terrorists/spies/etc.
But it sure feels like nobody in government listens anymore, unless you are a major group, a rich person, a rich company, or a foreign government with lots of $.
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To clarify, you can keep posting this stuff. Nobody's stopping you. I am choosing to respond with my opinion that it's just.. uh, a wee bit distasteful for this website.
Re:Recruitment tool? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd not classify it as terrorism: it's not designed to instill fear in the populace to accomplish a political goal through violence. It is frequently criminal behavior, in violation of the US Constitution, international treaties, and the mission statement of the NSA published at https://www.nsa.gov/about/miss... [nsa.gov]. Their abusive monitoring of domestic communications violates every one of their published goals. Yet, as documented by Edward Snowden and visible from the leaked documents at Wikipedia, they engage in illegal monitoring of US communications as a matter of routine practice. They are demonstrably unwilling or unable to obtain intelligence on human trafficking or narcotics entering the USA, or to provide intelligence to allies to control the enormous heroin trade from Afghanistan.
That trade is fascinating, Heroin is much more profitable than any other crop in Afghanistan, and the spread of the heroin trade is improving the Afghan ecology. They're using solar panels to fuel water pumps, and the water is encouraging other plant growth around the farms, which retains water better in the soil and reduces chronic erosion problems.
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Millions of people of many shades disagree with me about many things. Why would they classify the NSA as committing terrorism? Can you point to a specific act by that agency? A criminal conspiracy guilty of violating law, the Constitution, and international treaties signed by the USA, certainly. If there were convincing signs of competence on their part, I'd be less concerned about them. But the lack of prosecutions, much less convictions, for large scale criminal activities used to fund terrorism such as t
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Yeah, and do you have ANY evidence one way or the other WHATSOEVER?
Or do you confuse this for a church?
You haven't even freaking met Snowden yet. For all you know, it might be a simulation in an universe entirely simulated by your mind... a Boltzmann brain (look it up)! ^^ :P
As is this comment.
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Not for me, and apparently not for the person you are replying to... if there's one thing Trump's presidency has shown it's that we want people to be incredibly sceptical of non-evidence based assertions.
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That's Ok. You just made a number of assertions in your post which are purely your opinion (vis a vis Trump). I am sure you be happy to supply some anecdotal evidence which helped you formed your opinion, but you won't be able to give any authoritative sources showing those opinions to be facts.
The only problem, of course, is that you won't be able to supply even anecdotal evidence 10 years from now.
In 10 years, you'll just state your opinion based on what you will believe you will have studied rigorous
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More specifically (Score:2)
You're not wrong. I'll just point out the page you linked to has two separate sections, Mission and Values. The second half is Values and that can be taken with a mountain of salt as you pointed out.
The first half of their page is their stated mission. Their mission is:
--
Mission Statement
The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) leads the U.S. Government in cryptology that encompasses both signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (now referred to as cybersecurity) produ
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That's just great. They support terrorism but still can't support UTF-8.
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Wait, there's legal fucking over US citizens too? Where can I sign up? ;)
Oh, and fucking over foreign citizens is OK or what? Little four year old girl in Afghanistan that never did anything wrong, totally deserves it? Wtf.
Re:Recruitment tool? (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, there's legal fucking over US citizens too? Where can I sign up? ;)
Try Tinder.
The world is a very bad place. (Score:2)
Humanity is evil (some humans are good, don't confuse the two) and composed of violent amoral competitors.
It cannot be different and our race evolved to compete this way. There is no "good", just "advantage".
War and espionage are necessary. They should be better managed but the choice is which nation you'd prefer as hegemon, Putin's Russia, China or the US. There is no third real option. Grow up and forget your ideals. The world does not run on them.
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Why do you think I'm against war and espionage?
I just want them to do their chartered job: spying on the electronic communications of foreign powers.
A peacenik I am not.
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WHile a major fuckup occurred under W, the NSA has been overall above reproach.
CIA has had issues, but the NSA is not part of that.
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I think you need to read The Puzzle Palace and get back to me on that. They most certainly are not above reproach for violating their charter.
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Uh, goalposts moved. Got it. Conversation over.
I've repeatedly said I have no issues with them working per their charter--spying on foreign enemies' ELINT.
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As I have suggested, give him a medal and then put 2 between his eyes.
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Of course it's a recruitment tool. And it's significantly cheaper than the DoD's recruitment tools like paying for the star-spangled banner before sporting events.
Re: Recruitment tool? (Score:2)
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Easy to break (Score:2, Funny)
I could decipher all of these in under 5 minutes.
IF I had the computing power and software that the NSA has to throw at it.
If you can do it in your head you will probably get recruited, or already have been.
And if you can't, your probably going to get investigated for having that level of decryption software installed on your personal computer.
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>If you can do it in your head you will probably get recruited, or already have been.
Some of us made the choice a long time ago not to work for governments and to never sign a secrecy agreement with any government.
It's not a principled move. It frees you to work on cryptography in the commercial domain and security without being compromised. 90% of a career later, I think it was a good choice.
I don't hire people with clearance, you don't know who they are working for.
So being recruited? No thanks.
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They get really butthurt when you tell one of their recruiters on a college campus that you'd be happy to work for them, except for the part where they aren't actually doing their job.
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True story: I declined to sign the official secrets act prior to an interview at a satellite company . End of interview.
Many years later I was presenting my design for the 802.16 PKMv2 link security protocol at an 802 conference in Shenzhen China. If I had signed that bit of paper in the mid 90s, I may well have not been allowed to do that.
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Anyone smart enough to solve such riddles, is also not dumb enough to work for the Gestapo. They are struggling to find people nowadays, and they know it.
Re:Easy to break (Score:5, Insightful)
Computing power is useless until you know what to aim it at. Take the first puzzle: Where is the message encoded? Is it the poem itself? The words "mallows" and "xylobiums" are a bit odd - but where do we go from there? What about the scrolls and decorations in this overly decorative font? Or perhaps the poem is irrelevant, and the message is actually in the flower petals of the picture at the bottom left? Probably not, for the first puzzle, but what about steganography - there is an awful lot of JPG noise, you could hide a truck in there.
You may have to try more than one of these ideas. And for each idea, you get the next question: how is the message encoded?
That "how" is difficult on its own. Take the second image: Each cross contains two threads, each of which has four colors. So each cross is a nibble; two crosses make a byte. That would work for a fixed encoding of ASCII, but there are 135 crosses (so 67.5 bytes) whereas the message only contains 33 characters. A 16-bit encoding might be a better fit, or perhaps a variable-length encoding - but which one? Or maybe some of the crosses are distractors - but which ones? Computing power will help you check an idea, but it isn't going to make these decisions for you.
You don't need computing power, anyway, not more than your average PC. You need good ideas and a lot of determination.
Why not? (Score:2)
They know if we have a girlfriend and her name from our phone contacts, just as those of our friends and business partners and our search and browsing history ...
NSA is USCYBERCOM-Led (Score:1)
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The actual director is never revealed, and the one they tell you is the director, is a placeholder, so nobody can kidnap the actual director and threaten them. Every spying agency in the world does that.
Keeping us safe... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or 9/11 for that matter.
It's funny, they got access to EVERYTHING, yet don't stop the dumbest, most obvious things.
Which leaves only one conclusion: They wanted it.
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If they had, you wouldn't know that they had. Maybe a mob is going to storm the Capitol every other year and the NSA missed it for the first time ever.
Your reward for solving? (Score:2)
What YEAR is this? (Score:2)
Holy crap, MP3 and BMP? Did I wake up in 1995?
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What was curious to me is that they used a PDF and not just an HTML page to host the links... I suspect there's something hidden in that PDF as well
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You could open and read it. A PDF is a text file, after all, with optional compression--but you can decompress the sections and read/edit them just fine in your favorite text editor. Extract any image streams to a separate file and view.
Source: I am far too intimately acquainted with the PDF specs and writing PDFs by hand and fixing bugs in the PDF output of various software.
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Fun fact: SVG is the XML implementation of PDF. (Source: Somebody who was involved in its creation, interviewed on <Computerphile> on YouTube.)
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That makes total sense in retrospect, since they share that drawing command scheme.
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More flaws in PDF readers to get onto your system.
You think they hire anyone they don't know every intimate detail about?
Yeah, they don't care for your baby-dog-guro-orgy snuff or swastika wall decoration. Probably got that themselves. All they care for is that you got NO conscience whatsoever and are easily deluded into justifying the most evil things.
Um... 12 puzzles? 11 plus a key (Score:2)
I count puzzles 0 through 10 as 11. The inventory also miscounts the number of .jpg puzzles (2), so I suspect they're counting the key for puzzle 9 as the 12th item.
My favorite comment is the one that says they've solved #12, with a little trouble. Ouija board difficulty, I'm guessing.
(yeah, I know. Nobody reads the article. )
The correct puzzle answers. (Score:3)
The correct answer to the puzzles is, "I couldn't figure them out so I infiltrated your workstation to find the answers." ;)
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NSA: We know. We've been looking at your PC while you did it. What do you think the PDF was for?
Hey NSA! (Score:2)
Go fuck yourselves with a chainsaw.
You're as bad as the Gestapo for Stasi themselves, and every single one of you pieces of shit deserves decades in prison for being traitors to their own people.
s/for/or/ (Score:2)
I could have sworn I wrote "or". Let's see if more stuff ... changes ...
Each puzzle reveals... (Score:2)
And the subject line (Score:2)
Instantly conjured up an image of a psychotic person giving me a Valentine's day card with razor blades carefuly concealed within the edges of the card so I wouldn't know they were there until my hands started bleeding.
Now I wonder why my mind would come up with such a crazy idea? :-|
Puzzle difficulty psychology (Score:4, Insightful)
I think they should have made the first one or two puzzles drop-dead easy to solve, to give an "Aren't I clever!" sugar hit and thus keep people engaged enough to bother tackling the others.
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They did. For example, puzzle zero's capitalized letters form the pattern RPASSWODMIXSWAP...
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Solved it. (Score:5, Funny)
Challenging puzzles! (Score:3)
Wow. If I were in my 20s, with more time on my hands than I knew what to do with, i would really enjoy these puzzles. Some, it's easy to see how to approach them, but even knowing the direction you need to go, these puzzles are tough.
And, yes, this is an obvious recruitment tool for the NSA.
It's a shame. The NSA, I mean. It represents a collection of really fine minds, that could be applied to really important things like - for example - working on newer, really solid approaches to cryptography. Instead, somewhere in the past couple of decades, the whole organizations has been perverted. You cannot trust the work they produce, because they've been caught deliberately weakening protocols. Snowdon's revelations show that they no longer consider themselves bound by law, but only by "don't get caught".
At this point, the whole organization should just be disbanded, because they are totally untrustworthy. Of course, that applies to virtually the entire US federal government: there is no better example of Pournelle's Iron Law.
I guess I'm special (Score:2)
How about by reporting some 0-days? (Score:2)
I don't need logic puzzles, I need security.
Fun! (Score:1)
They are cool puzzles, not hard by any stretch, but they are not meant to be 'Hard', they are meant to be FUN, take it like that people, geeze....check the color channels, look for offset bit shifts, ascii encodings come on, its fun!
The first audio sample (Score:2)
Did they use a real 303, and is that a clue?
I solved the first four (Score:2)
The answers, in order are:
correct
horse
battery
staple
U.S. Cyber Command: a total waste of space (Score:1)
Comment (Score:2)
The NSA is clearly on a recruitment drive (Score:1)
The NSA is clearly on a recruitment drive, they have discovered that by only employing thugs and undertaking activities which are distasteful to anyone with morality, that now they have no-one who is capable more intellectual based activities that may give them a clue about whats going on.
i need love (Score:1)
dating love (Score:1)