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Mafia Boss Using Crook Crypto Captured
boggis writes "Discovery is running a story on Bernardo Provenzano, the recently arrested 'boss of bosses' of the Sicilian Mafia. He apparently wrote notes to his henchmen using a modified form of the Caesar Cipher, which was easily cracked by the police and resulted in further arrests of collaborators. Discovery's cryptography expert describes it as a code that 'will keep your kid sister out'."
Even worse, people decode random-substitution ciphers in newspapers daily, for fun. A rotating cipher is even easier to break since the letters remain sequential. I guess we could give the guy a break though, since, according to the article, he only has about a 3rd-grade education.
... but it still took the police almost 50 years to catch him
so he must've been doing something right. I imagine the ceaser
code was simply to prevent other knuckle dragging criminals from
understanding the message, not a load of top crypto crackers
at police HQ.
A good leader would delegate tasks like communication security to someone who could do that well. However, I get the feeling that someone who dropped out of school at 8 and became a mob boss may not have been keeping up to date on the latest management training strategies. =)
Given that he steered the mafia for 50 years, evading the police and keeping control over the organisation at the same time, furthermore without usage of any modern technology including cryptography... Well, I would call him a good leader. Probably way better than your typical manager with a bucket load of certificates.
Always put off dealing with time-wasting morons. If you would like to know how... I'll get back to you
Trivial to break. Wrapping the cloth around a pole is just an easier way of looking at every x letters. It'd take about 2 minutes to brute force the value for x manually, a program with a dictionary could do it in milliseconds.
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