Slashdot Mirror
UK Recruiting Codebreakers Via Social Networks
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."
that'll piss 'em right off!
The hex looks like x86 executable. Is it available as a file? I'm not going to key this into DEBUG.
It's "passw0rd"
-- Make America hate again!
...call them up and ask the phone drone...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
There's a reason they're recruiting them. And it's perfectly innocent. Honestly. http://earth101.net/?wc
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 pursue.
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.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Why on earth would they post that code as an image...
...the "support" email address hidden on the website. You'll have a nice surprise.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.canyoucrackit.co.uk%2F#q=site:http://www.canyoucrackit.co.uk/&hl=en&prmd=imvns&filter=0&fp=1&biw=1680&bih=795&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&cad=b see the second link ? not very mi6 this thing...
Pr0t3ct!on#cyber_security@12*12.2011+
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.
One gets hired, the rest gets under close surveillance.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
All this recruitment tool will do is attract aspies.
And do we really want aspies with responsibility for national security?
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/
good description of whats going on here.
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.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
> 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.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
yet what they do...extradite one of there best....thats how you recruit
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!
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
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
Some clever programmer could outsource it, pay the hacker, and take the job. :)