Britain’s intelligence service, GCHQ, is recruiting. But it wants its newest spies to be tech-savvy, so it’s inviting home-grown hackers to crack a puzzle on its new website in order to apply for a job.
The UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) works closely with MI5 and MI6, and usually recruits its spies straight outta university. But to keep up with the times, it’s looking to take on self-taught hackers as well. They claim to be after online specialists with a keen interest in “ethical hacking”.
So what’t first step? Head to their (oddly unbranded) website and try and crack the problem. Then, you’ll be able to apply for a job that will turn you into some sort of cross between James Bond and Julian Assange. Maybe.
According to The Guardian, GCHQ says that anyone who is found to have illegally hacked the code will not be eligible for recruitment. Which is slightly ironic. But still, you’ve been warned. [The Guardian, Can You Crack It]
InformedGamer
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 10:00 AMWith a starting salary of AUD$49,000 who would want to?!
alex effing
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 10:54 AMApparently theres lots of parts
http://pastebin.com/cqzbkw4H
alex effing
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 10:54 AMoh and have you seen spooks – thats why you’d want too. Facial deepfrysion
cayal
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 11:05 AMIt’s just a hex-code isn’t it?
Andrew
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 1:55 PMYup. Unfortunately it’s a jpg of hex code tho, so you can’t just copy/paste it into a translator, you have to manually input it or use OCR. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t even encrypted…. but I feel my attention span already waning.
light487
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 1:31 PM“GCHQ says that anyone who is found to have illegally hacked the code will not be eligible for recruitment. Which is slightly ironic. But still, you’ve been warned”
Yes but maybe you can apply for the real job :)
Tim
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 2:52 PMhttp://www.canyoucrackit.co.uk/soyoudidit.asp
CrowdedTrousers
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 4:22 PMSeeing Tim hasn’t showed how he got to the answer, allow me to share ours with you. Anti-Spoiler – this *won’t* ruin it for anyone who wants to solve it themselves – it’s more a ‘barometer question’ moment (journey or destination?) :
google “site:canyoucrackit.co.uk” and expand to see the omitted results and bam!
OK – *not* in the spirit of the challenge, but nor is it illegal. there’s no guarantee that what we found was the outcome of the challenge, but i’ve got a high degree of confidence it is.
we cracked another agency’s puzzle last week the hard way – which led us to discover the ‘winnah!’ page had been spidered by google. so as soon as we saw this one…
Ames
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 4:48 PMalso If you put your nose to the screen and stare you can see a 3D butterfly