Programmers unraveled yet another Zodiac killer cipher half a century later
Photo: zodiackillerfacts.com
An international team of hackers, which included experts from the USA, Australia and Belgium, was able to guess a serial cipher nicknamed the Zodiac, which was never caught. This code is 51 years old. The zodiac sent him to the American newspaper San Francisco Chronicle in 1969.
Cipher 340, named for the number of words it contains, reads: “I hope you have a lot of fun trying to catch me. It wasn’t me on that TV show. I am not afraid of the gas chamber, because it will send me to heaven even earlier, because now I have enough slaves to work for me. They are afraid of death, but I am not. ” We are talking about the television show The Jim Dunbar Show from October 22, 1969, which was telephoned by an unknown person who introduced himself as Zodiac. The text of the message was sent two weeks after this show.
While working on the cipher, the team hoped that the killer would reveal his name in the text.
One of the researchers, programmer David Oranchak, has been working on the killer puzzle for almost 15 years. He wanted to create a program to decrypt the message, but attempts were unsuccessful. Oranczak even set up a website called ZodiacKillerCiphers.com with information on ciphers.
Another member of the group, programmer Jarl Van Eycke, created AZdecrypt, a tool that allowed him to set the world record for decrypting bigrams.
Sam Blake identified and collected information about the changes in the ciphertext, which ultimately turned out to be the key to the hack. By running the cipher through AZdecrypt, the team found that there are 650,000 possible readings of the cipher. Then the programmers began to select the most likely scenarios.
Photo: David Oranczak, Sam Blake, Jarl Van Eycke / zodiackillerfacts.com
The first unraveled message in 1969, “Code 408”, had encryption, in which it was necessary to select letters that were designated by certain symbols. The meaning is consistent with the new decoding. In the first letter, the killer wrote that he was killing people in order to “collect slaves” who could serve him during his afterlife in “paradise”. The zodiac included the same errors in the text, using the words “paradise” and “slaves.”
Photo: zodiackillerfacts.com
In the last “Code 340” the words were lined up diagonally downward, sometimes shifting to the side along the column. Similar schemes could be found in the ciphers of the American military leadership of the 1950s, Oranchak said.
Two messages of the Zodiac are still unsolved. It is alleged that in one of them, the killer still calls his name.
The zodiac was active in California in the 1960s. He was never arrested or identified. At the same time, the killer amused himself by sending encrypted messages about himself to the editorial offices of newspapers. In one of them, he said that he had killed 37 people. At the same time, the US police officially confirmed only seven episodes with his participation.
During the attack, 388 BNB and 1.7 million TUSD were stolen, which is a total of $ 1.9 million at the current exchange rate.
On October 20, the PancakeHunny decentralized protocol came under attack with instant credit and lost 388 BNB and 1.7 million TUSD (approximately $ 1.9 million). Problems with the operation of the platform were discovered by experts of the cyber service PeckShield Inc.
“The break-in was carried out due to an error in the inflation system. It allowed using a small amount of ALPACA tokens for staking and receiving a large amount of TUSD. These tokens were then used to issue a large number of HUNNY tokens, ”the researchers write.
During the attack, the attacker made a total of 32 transactions and received $ 1.9 million in ETH in the final. The loss of such a sum negatively impacted the work of PancakeHunny. The platform’s token lost 60% in less than 10 minutes.
The creators of PancakeHunny confirmed that the platform was under attack, highlighting that users’ funds are safe. Only the HUNNY course was affected.
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In the gaming ecosystem of China, the FiveSys rootkit is distributed, which has successfully passed Microsoft certification under the guise of a driver.
The rootkit, signed with a Microsoft certificate, is being distributed to computer gamers in China, according to Darkreading.
Cybersecurity experts have determined that a rootkit with a valid Microsoft digital signature is being distributed to gamers in China. According to Bitdefender experts, the FiveSys software is used to redirect traffic to an attacker-controlled proxy server and appears to be exploited by criminals with a particular interest in the Chinese gaming market. The main purpose is believed to be the theft of player identification and payment data.
This is the second malicious program this year targeted at Chinese gamers and bearing a valid Microsoft signature – in June, G-Data reported that a Netfilter rootkit had been detected.
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Components
Video cards that should have cost $ 200-300. Younger 3D-cards Radeon RX 6000 will be released in early 2022
Younger video cards AMD and Nvidia of the current generation have not yet come out. Both companies are in no hurry to present budget solutions, but sooner or later this will happen.
According to the latest data, AMD graphics cards based on GPU Navi 24 will be released in the first quarter of next year. Previously, these models were named Radeon RX 6500 and RX 6500 XT. In any case, these will be the youngest cards in the lineup, as Navi 24 will be the smallest GPU of this generation.
The video cards will allegedly have a TDP of 100-120 W and will compete with the GeForce RTX 3050/3050 Ti and the lower-end Intel Arc models. The recommended price is expected to be in the range of $ 200-300, but, as we know, in reality there are almost no such prices on the market.
We know from early leaks that the Navi 24 GPU should contain 1024 stream processors. The Infinity Cache will be only 16 MB, but there were earlier rumors about the absence of this element in the junior Navi GPU. However, with a 64-bit Infinity Cache bus, it certainly would not be superfluous.
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