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December 12, 2020 10:00 am

The Zodiac Killer's Cipher Has Been Solved After 51 Years

"It's taken over 50 years, but the solution to the Zodiac Killer's cipher has been found," writes Slashdot reader quonset. CNN reports: Dubbed the "340 cipher," the message was unraveled by a trio of code breakers -- David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia, Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian computer programmer, and Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician. The Zodiac Killer is most known for leaving a trail of five unsolved murders between 1968 and 1969. He was never caught, but he gained notoriety by writing letters to police and local media up until 1974, sometimes in code, boasting of the killings. Bloody bits of clothing were included with his letters as proof of his actions. He claims he killed as many as 37 people. Oranchak detailed the process for cracking the cipher on his website and in a YouTube video, where he used a specifically developed decryption software and a bit of luck to finally make the connection. The team used a unique program to sift through 650,000 variations of the message. In one, a couple of words appeared. "We got really lucky and found one that had part of the answer, but it wasn't obvious," Oranchak said, explaining that they then had to handpick their way through to decipher the rest of the message. The only disappointing part, Oranchak said, is that the missive contained no personally identifying information. Oranchak holds out no hope for solving the two remaining ciphers. He described the mission as "almost hopeless," as both are very short, with thousands of different names and phrases that could fit.

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