unforum

[Arcas]

All the letters of the alphabet are present except the letter X.

Z is the letter appearing most often.

I thought the last line would be Martin, like a signature.

The letters "eydplluve" can be found twice in the message. Once just inside the quotes and then again close to the bottom, like it is some special nine letter word (or maybe two words that go together I guess).

That's what I've been able to come up with, but it didn't help me at all. The numbers have to mean something else other than letters since we have a total of 30 characters, but that would mean the last line wouldn't be Martin.

I remember in the first message from Natalie that Martin was going to use "classical cryptography" so that computers might not be able to crack the codes. Does that ring a bell with anybody?

[Mod Re Flux]

From what I just googled, "classical cryptography" refers to simples substitution or translation ciphers. Meaning that letters/words are replaced by other letters/words or that the order of the letters is scrambled.

Letter frequency would be one way to crack it, its possible that Z -> E because Z is most frequent in this document and E is the most frequent letter in the English language. Then again it might not.

[Dregyn]

If you substitute the last 6 to martin it looks like this (lowercase is the changes):

[amandel]

@Arcas: Yaha, in the Vigenere you cracked Natalie said:..."a computer will not pick it up as an established code" and that's the MORE blog entry title also.

[Mod Re Flux]

I tried a simple substitution where Z=E but nothing popped out.

[Vancanek]

Blog updated with a link to a photo.

[thebruce]

care to share how you know it's stegged?

It's a PNG, which is usually used for a reason (typically, lossless compression). Usually lossless images are used so that a modified one can be subtracted from the original to reveal a message.
Unless we know what program they used to steg in binary with a password... have figured that out?

[Vancanek]

Used uncamo with no password. Here is the file:

[Uberg33k]

Sorry for being out all day, I was helping a friend move.

Here's the entirety of the sound file sent to me.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=F36Z48TP

The email came from Ambassadors AreInDanger (ambassadorsareindangerSPLAThotmail.com)

I'll have to catch up on the other stuff that's gone on here.

[thebruce]

thanks...
Camouflage doesn't install on my Vista, so using my work machine w/XP I got the file.

Contents:

[thebruce]

Got it!
That was certainly a necessary key.

Explanation:

[Mod Re Flux]

Ahhh beat me to it! I was working along those lines though.

[Merago]

Apparently, Chile is 4300km long and has an average width of 175km.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chile

I suspect the ambassador for Chile may be the one in danger.

[thebruce]

with the grid, I started out on the bifid idea, though the numbers weren't standard, so figured it had a twist. Plus, had to do everything trying both coordinate directions - col/row and row/col. Bifid's standard is row/col. So this had a couple of twists (if you consider it based on bifid and not just its own methodology; really the only commonality is the 5x5 grid).

The nice thing is the numbers add a character to the sentence length, so finding words that match letter patterns by word length would be FAR more difficult. Not a simple substitution cipher, because the first/last letter of each word would depend on the word preceding or following it.

Also, nice find on Chile, Merago. Bryce should be informed.

[Uberg33k]

So does the sound file have any meaning?