To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Australian Signals Directorate, the country's intelligence agency, the government issued a limited run of fifty thousand 50-cent coins with a series of encrypted codes embedded on them, each more difficult than the last and together forming a message to be uncovered. The agency put up a web form for anyone who completed the puzzle to submit their answers, with the hope of finding up-and-coming cryptography experts to recruit.
However, they didn't expect the code to be broken in an hour- which it was, by a 14-year-old boy living in Tasmania.
However, they didn't expect the code to be broken in an hour- which it was, by a 14-year-old boy living in Tasmania.
14yo Tasmanian boy cracks national intelligence agency code in 'just over an hour'
A 14-year-old Tasmanian boy cracks four levels of code imprinted on a commemorative 50-cent coin in "just over an hour" after it was released by the nation's foreign intelligence cybersecurity agency — and the spy boss says she wants to meet him so she can "recruit him".
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