NSA tweeted a mysterious coded message to recruit code breakers

The National Security Agency has decided to kill two birds with one stone by advertising for potential code breakers in cipher. Some initially thought it was gobbledygook, but it turns out a very cryptic text from the NSA was not the product of a four-legged feline run wild on a keyboard or a smart phone gone rogue in an agent’s back pocket. Rather, the tweet bearing the hashtag #MissionMonday was a direct appeal to potential NSA analysts who had the chops to decode the encrypted message.

The missive, consisting of nine blocks of letters, all of which contained 12 characters except the third and the last, ended up being an example of a substitution cipher, by which units of plaintext are replaced with ciphertext according to a regular system.

tpfccdlfdtte pcaccplircdt dklpcfrp?qeiq lhpqlipqeodf gpwafopwprti izxndkiqpkii krirrifcapnc dxkdciqcafmd vkfpcadf. #MissionMonday #NSA #news
— NSA (@NSACareers) May 5, 2014

Speaking to The Daily Dot, an NSA spokesperson confirmed that the tweet was part of a campaign to “attract the best and brightest” to the intelligence agency, with further “mission related coded Tweets” due to be posted on each Monday this month.

This sort of recruitment strategy is not unusual for government agencies looking to attract curious youngsters online. In September last year GCHQ, the NSA’s British counterpart, set up their own “cyber treasure-hunt” sprinkling a series of codes across the web.