A colleague bought my attention to a detail I missed in the logo for the newly established Cyber Command at Fort Meade. Appropriately enough, inside the gold ring is an encrypted message. According to this story by Noah Shachtman in Wired, “On the logo’s inner gold ring is a code: 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a.”This coded message relates to the commands mission.
Wired held a contest for the first person, presumably someone outside the command, who could crack the code. The winner got a t-shirt or a ticket to the International Spy Museum.
It only took a little over three hours for the winner, a commenter named “jemelehill,” to crack it.
“USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries”
That’s pretty straightforward stuff. I actually liked some of the wrong answers like, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that,” or “If you can read this, send your resume to jobs@nsa.gov.”
