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The Zodiac Killer taunted police, journalists, and the public with menacing letters and four cryptic puzzles. A few weeks ago, a trio of amateur codebreakers solved the so-called “340 cipher.” by Press Play with Madeleine Brand.
The Zodiac Killer stalked the San Francisco Bay Area in the late
1960s. He killed at least five people, but claimed as many as 37
victims. He taunted police, journalists, and the public with menacing
letters and four cryptic puzzles. One puzzle included a 340-character
grid of enigmatic symbols so hopelessly scrambled and rearranged that it
baffled cryptologists for decades.
David Oranchak is among a trio of codebreakers who recently solved a 340-character grid of scrambled symbols from the Zodiac Killer.
Photo: courtesy of David Oranchak.
But a few weeks ago, a trio of amateur codebreakers solved the so-called “340 cipher.” David Oranchak is one of them...
The one thing the message didn’t include? Any clues to who Zodiac might be. Nor any obvious clues to two other, much shorter messages Zodiac sent after the 340 cipher.
“They're very short, which means they're very difficult for cryptographers to work on. Because the longer the text is, the more clues that you have, and the more weaknesses that you can exploit in order to get the underlying messages,” Oranchak says. “But there's too many different possible solutions that fit into those two small ciphers. So it would take some extra evidence to confirm any solutions to those.”
Source: KCRW
