[ad_1]
Three crypto experts were able to crack 340 encryption (Cipher 340), one of the more than 50-year-old riddles crafted by the Zodiac Killer, a serial killer who plagued California’s San Francisco Bay area during the 1960s and 1970s. The mystery was solved by the cryptographer and Web designer David Oranchak, with the help of an Australian mathematician and a Belgian warehouse worker. The team sent the discovery to the FBI, which has already confirmed the resolution of the encrypted message.
The puzzle was sent in a letter to the newspaper. Chronicle of San Francisco in November 1969, in the period when Zodiac Killer was active.
The serial killer was responsible for the deaths of five people between 1968 and 1969, having sent several letters about his actions to local newspapers, among which were four encrypted messages. The first, the Z 408, was shipped in July 1969, divided into three parts for different newspapers, having been quickly deciphered by a couple of amateur cryptographers. THE 340 encryption (it owes its name to the fact that it has 340 characters) is the second to be decoded. AZ 13, sent in April 1970, and Z 32, in June of the same year, remain unresolved.
The team that cracked the code hoped to find clues to the identity of a murderer (of whom nothing is known), but the criminal’s message is nothing more than a series of provocations aimed at those trying to catch him.
A Encryption 340 which has now been decrypted
DR
“I hope you are having a lot of fun trying to catch me … I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradise sooner because now I have enough slaves working for me,” says the message in reference to the deaths. what he was responsible for.
David Oranchak described the discovery as “exciting,” which is the culmination of the work he has been doing since 2006 around the Zodiac Killer codes. “We have the solution since last Saturday. When I started looking at the Zodiac codes several years ago, I thought it was enough to write a computer program that would solve it, but it has been killing me all along. Until now, “he said in statements to Chronicle of San Francisco.
OR Web designer A 46-year-old man living in Virginia admits that he could never have solved the mystery without the help of two other crypto enthusiasts: Australian mathematician Sam Blake and Belgian warehouse worker Jarl Van Eykcke, whom Oranchak describes as a ” very programmer. ” talented ”in a video on how to solve the puzzle that he posted on his YouTube channel.
“Every member of the Zodiac Killer crypto community knew that the puzzle had another layer in addition to figuring out which letter corresponded to which symbol, and that’s what we discovered,” Oranchak explained.
The American explained that Sam Blake was interested in manipulating and transposing the characters of the 340 encryption sending more than 650,000 variations of the combination that were later analyzed with the help of a program created by Jarl Van Eykcke. On December 3, one of the combinations Oranchak analyzed appeared to have potential. “It was largely a big mess like many of the others, but this one had words like ‘I hope you are trying to find me’ and ‘in the gas chamber’ which could be the way to the final message,” explains David Oranchak on video. where he goes into details on how to decrypt the encrypted message.
From there to the full message, the team took two days to send the solution to the FBI, responsible for the case. The US federal agency confirmed this Friday that the resolution of the message had been received and that the investigation was still open.
The decrypted code does not seem to offer great clues as to the identity of the perpetrator of the murders, the last one committed in October 1969, and those responsible for the investigation over the years admit that the other two messages must be heeded. The criminal indicated in at least one letter that he left his name in one of the codes.
The Zodiac Killer case is one of the most famous to be solved in the United States. The story gained worldwide visibility in 2007 thanks to David Fincher’s film, Zodiac, starring Robert Downey Jr., Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo and based on the book of the same name by Robert Graysmit, a cartoonist from the Chronicle of San Francisco at the time of the murders, he spent more than a decade trying to solve the case.
[ad_2]
