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Sun 1 Sep, 2013 08:27 am
So I'm updating my resume, and one of the items I have listed is "encryption."
A couple of days after I post it on various job boards, I receive an E-mail saying "we'd like to set up a meeting" but the body of the text is completely garbled. So my interest is piqued, and I start to dig into the puzzle. Turns out that it's two columns of what appears to be random text, but the line breaks are all messed up.
So, I dump it into a text editor, line up all the text correctly, find some repeating characters, google. Looks like a MIME message. OK. I find a MIME decoder, push the text file through it, and PRESTO! Decoded!
Open the decoded file... and it's ******* SPAM!
@DrewDad,
I'm sorry that you wasted your time, but I do have to admit to some respect for the spammer. I hadn't heard about this one before.
@DrewDad,
Sound like someone have a good sense of humor in checking out ones of your claims abilities.
I would had likely given you more of a challenge such as a Vigenère cipher.
Well did NSA offer you a job?
Oh sorry, I did not see the results of your Cryptanalysis before starting to reply.
@Thomas,
They'd already sent me plain-text messages. I believe they were just sloppy with their code. It's actually a javascript code snippet that I decoded.
I suppose it could be some kind of spear-phishing, but if so it was completely inept. I think that would be giving them too much credit.
@BillRM,
BillRM wrote:
Sound like someone have a good sense of humor in checking out ones of your claims abilities.
That's what I thought at first, too. Realized that simple MIME encoding probably wasn't a test, though, but I followed it through to the end.
It was spam.
After I saw it was MIME encoding, I did think for a minute that it might be the trail of breadcrumbs for a game.
@DrewDad,
Correction. Looking at it again, it's just an HTML file, not javascript.
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