To Crack This Code Took Sega

In today's column - in a regular series in which Sordel draws upon extensive experience in the shadowy world of Internet hacking to decrypt the private communications of the hactivists - I shall break a code that has defied even our most august media outlet.

This, from Alexi Mostrous (surely not her real name) in today's Times:

"If the police want to stop these groups, they will have to penetrate murky online chatrooms and learn the hackers' language, which seems, at least to an outsider, often inexplicable. "Current Target: store.playstation.com || Status: FIRING NOW!" one member wrote during an attack on Sony."

While I am sure that Bletchley Park would have scratched its collective head at this code, and - at this moment - GCHQ has thirty supercomputers running permutational algorithms in the hope of cracking the private key with brute force, to Sordel this code is as simple as if it had been written in perfectly comprehensible English.

First one must work back from the known fact: that this was written during an attack upon Sony. Although this is not widely known, secret corporate documents reveal that the brand name Playstation was registered as a brand by Sony some years ago. This is just the sort of arcane commercial information that is prized by Anonymous.

Revisiting our code, we can therefore see that the string "store.playstation.com" is possibly a location of some sort.

Now examine the structure of the secret message. There are two binary pairs in the syntax, each separated by a colon. Since we now believe the second string in the first pair to be some sort of target, it is credible that the first binary pair represents some sort of targeting function. Indeed, the first part of the dyad does seem to include the word "target", so we may be thinking along the right lines.

Again, it will not be widely appreciated outside the group itself, but attacks of the sort mounted by modern anarcho-techno-rebels require both a target and some sort of temporal coordination. The word "status" is a little-known marker, used at the start of the second binary pair, to indicate the situation at the time that the message is issued.

Many of these hackers play computer games such as "shooters" in which words such as "fragging" are used as oblique references to attack. "Firing", presumably imported by analogy from the world of employment to which so many young IT amateurs have been excluded, is one of these, representing "attack, as with a laser pistol".

Finally, "now" is used to indicate the time of the firing. In order to encode this information, it has been converted to upper case. Without information as to the time that the message was sent, it is impossible to identify the actual date and time represented by the "Now Function", but it would certainly have been expressed in UTC in defiance of state borders.

I hope that nothing in today's edition will compromise similar codes currently in use by the CIA and MI5. After all, it's all fun & games until someone gets extradited to the U.S.