UK Recruiting Codebreakers Via Social Networks 85
Demerara writes in with a story about a unique codebreaking competition sponsored by the UK government. "UK intelligence agency GCHQ has launched a code-cracking competition to help attract new talent. The organization has invited potential applicants to solve a visual code posted at an unbranded standalone website. The challenge has also been 'seeded' to social media sites, blogs and forums. A spokesman said the campaign aimed to raise the profile of GCHQ to an audience that would otherwise be difficult to reach. 'The target audience for this particular campaign is one that may not typically be attracted to traditional advertising methods and may be unaware that GCHQ is recruiting for these kinds of roles,' the spokesman said."
Break it - but don't take the job (Score:3, Funny)
that'll piss 'em right off!
Re:Break it - but don't take the job (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Break it - but don't take the job (Score:5, Informative)
You seem to be assuming that people would want to work at GCHQ? I grew up next door to the place, and as someone who was training to be a programmer, GCHQ was that added bit of motivation to do well at university. It was always a case of "work hard, get a good degree, otherwise you'll have to apply to GCHQ.....". I certainly never got the impression it was an inspiring place to work.....
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It doesn't take top talent to break a code - that's maths, and that's why we have calculators.
The talent comes in thinking out of the box. When you think out of the box, you think to yourself, has this been done before or can anything that has already been done be used to arrive at an answer?
Application of a relevant tool (Google) can and often does reveal precisely the answer one is looking for, complete with working proof. See? I didn't even have to TOUCH my Hex editor.
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Re:Can I download it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Slight spoilers:
Yes, it is x86 machine code. However, if you key in the hex values and look/step through the code in a debugger you'll see that it is missing an important part.
Hint: You are not supposed to figure out this part on your own (you can probably figure out 7 of the missing bytes, but you will not be able to guess the rest). You can however find the remaining part on the canyoucrackit website if you are clever...
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Re:Can I download it? (Score:4, Informative)
Oh is that all it is?
I'd got as far as pulling apart the code into sections, and found the other bit....
Not exactly tricky then. 'File' will tell you what it is, and the other bit's not hard with another two simple unix commands.
Re:Can I download it? (Score:4, Funny)
You can however find the remaining part on the canyoucrackit website if you are clever...
additionally, if you are smart, you'll probably choose to find yourself a better job/salary in the industry instead of picking a govt position during time of austerity.
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It's primary job is to spy on Americans (for legal reasons the NSA isn't allowed do, so they spy on Europeans, Ozzies and the rest of the world in return for GCHQ spying on Americans).
That is absurd. The agreement known as the UKUSA agreement (or "Five Eyes") prohibits this; each member nations absides by the other nations laws in respect to their citizens. It is pure childish conspiracy to think that this is the logic. GCHQ requires the same warrants NSA does to collect on US citizens which, coincidentally, are rather easy for NSA to obtain if they have justification (i.e., find me a FISA warrant that has been denied).
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NZ and Australia came in under the UK ~ in 1946 via the UK-USA Technical Conference, Canada via agreements, letters and memoranda of understanding was finally entered in 1953.
Most of the deal was to collect foreign signals via the residual British empire (e.g. Iraq, Egypt, Cyprus, Ceylon) as a "swap" for US tech and massive long term funding.
"respect to their citizens" seems very distant from on the needs of the day i.e. a complete interchange of communic
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Maybe, though figures tend to indicate these days that the UK public sector is paid roughly equally to the private sector, and still (even with proposed changes) gives access to far better pensions.
One of the reasons I have no sympathy with those going on strike.
Re:Can I download it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe, though figures tend to indicate these days that the UK public sector is paid roughly equally to the private sector, and still (even with proposed changes) gives access to far better pensions.
One of the reasons I have no sympathy with those going on strike.
I went on strike, and I certainly get paid less than in the private sector. I like contributing to the country (science research), but there's a limit.
With the current offer I'll essentially lose about £1000 pa (increased pension contributions), and that's after 24 months of flat pay.
The problem is private pensions are shit, and we shouldn't have a race to the bottom. We should improve private pensions.
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Shame the last government didn't do anything about that when they had the chance really, puportedly the party of the working man, they looked on cheerily as the private sector destroyed its pension arrangements, and even layered some tax on top.
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They were raised above the private sector before the recession. This situation is not new.
Who said anything about all being in it together? I've never said we're all in anything together. Hell, I'm not even in the UK any more.
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http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=19888836 [xda-developers.com]
I've broken it! (Score:3, Funny)
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http://lmgtfy.com/?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.canyoucrackit.co.uk
and show ommitted results....
They google indexed it..
Simple, use the hacker's favourite tool... (Score:2)
...call them up and ask the phone drone...
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I know, I know, bad form etc., but...
I simply went through Google. Computer security isn't all Hex editors, there's a certain amount (well, 90%) of social engineering involved. I used my social engineering skills (AKA Google-Fu) to locate the solution in about a minute.
Bad news for GCHQ, I have no desire to work for the Government. I don't care what the renumeration package is.
Re:Simple, use the hacker's favourite tool... (Score:5, Funny)
Bad news for GCHQ, I have no desire to work for the Government. I don't care what the renumeration package is.
Not even if they offer free full IPv6 renumbering for life?
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If I don't know what that is, I don't need it.
I don't know what that is.
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No, it's not renumbering we're talking about, it's renumeration. That's where the UK government says they'll pay you £80.000 but actually pays you £30.000 due to a typographical error.
Social engineers & Googlers are wanted too (Score:4, Insightful)
> I simply went through Google ... bad news for GCHQ
You seem to think they are recruiting solely for codebreakers.
They may be recruiting for analysts - people who search for information. Let's say you have an agent in the field, whose cover story is being questioned by the enemy. You want an analyst to tell the agent how to correctly answer the enemy's questions so that the agent's cover is maintained.
It's quite possible that many of the "correct" answers published are actually incorrect misinformation. A good analyst would use his skills to weigh up which of the supposedly "correct" answers was the most reliable.
Sometimes the problem at the doughnut is not obtaining the data, but sifting through the massive amount of data to find the information you actually need.
Like any person living near Cheltenham, I have several friends who work there, and whilst it's entirely possible they're all secret maths geniuses, I doubt it. Codebreaking isn't the be-all and end-all of GCHQ's work, they have to sift and analyse the intel after they've got it.
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There's a reason they're recruiting them... (Score:5, Funny)
There's a reason they're recruiting them. And it's perfectly innocent. Honestly. http://earth101.net/?wc [earth101.net]
Re:There's a reason they're recruiting them... (Score:5, Funny)
There's a reason they're recruiting them. And it's perfectly innocent. Honestly. http://earth101.net/?wc [earth101.net]
Actually, no, we don't kill them... we offer them a govt salary (25k)... they'll commit suicide.
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25k a month doesn't sound that bad...
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Hah! I'll grab the money and instantly kill myself!
That's gonna show them!
no, they aren't (Score:1)
This isn't a recruitment exercise. It's a behaviour observation exercise.
Any submitted solution is likely to be collaborative and/or copied from the guy who first posts it.
My experience is that the British intelligence services tend to hand pick people starting with informal chats at the elite universities. If you've spent the last decade awake and seeing how the government uses the services for particular special interests subsumed in politics then you'd have to be lacking completely in moral fibre to purs
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Your experience? Oh do tell!
What are the modern Philbies, Macleans, Burgesses and Blunts up to these days?
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My experience begins and ends with observing that exercise. Otherwise I wouldn't be here making the criticism.
I can't say the same for some of my ex-schoolchums. :-(
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Very cryptic stuff: are you sure They didn't get to you too?
If you want to be taken even remotely seriously, provide names, dates, observed methods and supporting evidence. Go on, amaze us.
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Look, it's an open secret. Even college newspapers routinely cover it [varsity.co.uk].
If you think some stranger on the Internet is going to provide exclusive "evidence" of people who were taken on or had some hand in recruiting then you're a fool.
Re:no, they aren't (Score:4, Interesting)
yup they are dangling cheese for the rats (Score:2)
good description of whats going on here.
Oh the irony (Score:3)
Oh the irony - if you're really serious about espionage work, and you've got a Facebook account, then just forget it. There's already too much information about you out there for you to be of any real value.
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Oh the idiocy! How utterly irrelevant that is to a job as a codebreaker!
Sure, James bond probably wouldn't have a facebook page, but an entirely office-based crypto geek? Who cares so long as they're not posting state secrets, or pictures of themselves on holiday in Iran visiting that nice man Ahmedinejad....
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The more information about you there is available, the more likely that you can be influenced by pressure by other government / coporate agents.
Blackmail, OBVIOUSLY.
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Never heard of misinformation? And it would also show just what the candidate is capable of (i.e. keeping up one identity which is false, which may be useful to someone intercepting communications).
And if foreign governments can NAME our cryptographers, I'd be more worried about that in itself, rather than anything else they could find out about them.
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Blackmail, OBVIOUSLY.
They account for this already.
They don't care if you have three octogenarian boyfriends that you go to BDSM nights with, so long as you don't care if people know, i.e. can't be blackmailed with the information.
Re:Oh the irony (Score:5, Funny)
And if you have a "correctly set up" Facebook account, the mail will go to the wrong person.
Oh, the ironing.
Facebook accounts and spies... (Score:2)
So, you're a foreign intelligence agency, and a "student named "bob wabernacky" is entering your country...
Which of these two things is more suspicious for someone under the age of 30:
(1) He has a facebook account under that name ...of course if you are stupid enough to have posted pixel identical pictures to both your real and cover profiles, and they've been indexed by image, I guess you lose...
(2) He *doesn't* have a facebook account under that name?
-- Terry
Image only (Score:2)
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Google has the answer... (Score:1)
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Well, whether it's very MI6 depends on what you expect from the MI6...
Some government agencies lose a lot of their mystery and scariness once you've seen them from the inside. I don't doubt that it's the same for the MI6.
You're wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, once you take the job and sign the Official Secrets Act, it's forty years of standing in freezing bus shelters waiting to make contact with a pissed-off FSB clerk in her 50s in the hope of finding out where Putin's going on holiday next month. Unless you went to Eton and Oxford, in which case it's back to the management suite for the rest of your career.
solution (Score:2, Informative)
Pr0t3ct!on#cyber_security@12*12.2011+
Had a job interview at GCHQ... (Score:5, Interesting)
20 odd years ago...I had been doing the usual round of physics graduate interviews, GCHQ's was a little different. After getting the security pass to get in and being escorted to the interview room, they told me that I wouldn't be able to ask any questions about the job (except pay). Or rather, that I could ask if I liked, but they weren't going to answer. Weird.
The point I guess, is that GCHQ don't recruit clandestinely like spooks, even if the interview process is odd. They're part of the civil service, they advertise in the paper, and recruit graduates in the milk round.
Re:Had a job interview at GCHQ... (Score:5, Informative)
They've been advertising on plain Facebook ads for months, if not years.
Strange that highly qualified computing/maths graduates don't want to snoop on foreign governments (and their own people) when their potential employers are publishing news stories that they can't even intercept Skype calls, are offering zero information on exactly what you're expected to do and how much you'll be paid for it (which is pretty pitiful when they do tell you), etc.
I'm a maths & computing graduate, with a love and special interest for cryptography. I've seen dozens of adverts by both GCHQ and even MI5 for similar positions in papers, online and everywhere you'd normally advertise jobs over the years. They're obviously desperate for recruits (and seeing the dross that passes for university degrees these days, I'm not shocked).
But they don't give you even basic information and the only time GCHQ hits the news is when they want more and more control over your communications despite being less and less relevant since public-key encryption started to become the norm (ironically killed, pretty much, by their own invention).
I think it would be against my principles to actually WORK for them, even if I admire their historical efforts, support the cause to save Bletchley Park, think Turing deserves a little more recognition and respect for his work etc. Nowadays, I just get the impression that GCHQ want to blanket-snoop on my own people for no reason, catch the low-hanging fruit of people too stupid to use encryption (despite the fact that there's not a single recorded instance of someone "breaking" PKE encryption and using the results in a court case, even for terrorism where we've had to let people go or imprison them because we *THINK* they might have something incriminating in the encrypted data), and/or "justify" their existence / funding by creating the occasional terrorist scare story.
I don't think the bulk of the brains want to work for them because of what they've creeped into, it's as simple as that.
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I don't think the bulk of the brains want to work for them because of what they've creeped into, it's as simple as that.
I hope you're right. Thanks for your comment, and sentiment.
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I don't think they can't (if they really needed to) - I think it's one of their excuses for further funding and to blanket-control everything that enters or leaves the UK electronically:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/ [theregister.co.uk]
But they have used it as one of the reasons that they need "more power" because they "can't even listen in on Skype". At that point, you have to wonder if they are worth having at all, not give them sympathy, funds and have them employ people at ci
Result? (Score:2)
One gets hired, the rest gets under close surveillance.
Definitely. (Score:2)
All this recruitment tool will do is attract aspies.
And do we really want aspies with responsibility for national security?
Definitely. definitely.
I'm an excellent driver.
Uh oh, fifteen minutes to Judge Wapner.
-- Terry
Why people are leaving / recruiting is hard (Score:5, Informative)
I had my first graduate job there, and I was pretty much exactly what they're looking for. Started programming at a young age, maths degree from a top university, CS masters from the same place. I interned there, got a great appraisal and was offered a job. I started working there and I became disenchanted fairly swiftly. Cheltenham is an incredibly boring place to be 23 - the average age at GCHQ is probably mid thirties and most people had families and were settled. We went for after work drinks twice in my year there. Having said that, my job was fascinating. Extremely difficult, but fascinating. However, everything else was awful. Pay was ok - 25k for a grad starter isn't bad (although my university peers were generally on more), but it became clear very quickly that my pay rises were non existent. If I wanted to stay technical, then I might get to around 40k when I was 40. And that's might with a capital M. It's not really enough to comfortably raise a family and own a home.
When I told my boss I was resigning, he told me that he was resigning too because otherwise he was going to have to sell his house to cover his debts. He wasn't living an extravagant life - granted he had three young children though. His wife was working 3 jobs, and they were stressed. The only people happy at GCHQ are those who have chosen not to have kids, and often have their spouse working there too.
I left for a tech startup in London, and after 4 months here I'll be on 50% more than I was at GCHQ, and they'll continue paying me what I'm worth.
2 other guys left my team (around 10 people who were doing some of the most hard-core deep technical work in computing there) in the neighbouring months when I left. GCHQ cannot recruit and retain good people whilst the pay is so low - which is exactly what was said in the ISC report: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/14/gchq_microsoft_google/
A whopping $35-40k a year!? (Score:1)
What a great gig! I just solved it and it took me to a position description:
https://apply.gchq-careers.co.uk/fe/tpl_gchq01ssl.asp?newms=jj&id=35874
The starting salary for the GC10 position is £25,446.
The starting salary for the GC9 position is £31,152.
Ha!
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The starting salary for the GC10 position is £25,446. The starting salary for the GC9 position is £31,152.
Ha!
$35-40k? With maths like that, sincerely doubt that 'you solved it':
£25,446 = $39,963
£31,152 = $48,924
(Using current exchange rates). Or are you one of those people who finds it easier to just lie and make up figures to prove a point and hope that no-one checks the facts themselves?
Outsource it (Score:1)
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