Wanna be a british spy?

[Kor]

Crack the code!

For the article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... e-spy.html

[MaitreDétective]

Oh my, what a pain in the brain >:(
Too hard

[ProfParanoia]

*answers every dirty word I know*

I'm out of ideas.

[Akonyl]

literally assembly code, so I wouldn't hold out on cracking it with just puzzle skills

(not that I solved it myself or anything, I got as far as recognizing that it was hex numbers and I couldn't just copypaste it and was like psssh)

here's part 2 though if you want to write a virtual machine: http://www.canyoucrackit.co.uk/15b436de ... e5d0b20.js

[Abs.]

The answer is obviously 21, half of 42

[ranger]

yeah, anyone computer savvy could recognize the hex formatting.

The article mentions this job isn't really about being a 'spy', but more on the levels of cyber crime for the government - meaning if you don't know jack about computers, random puzzle skills aren't going to be much help.

Akonyl is right.  I wrote the hex of it and realized its x86 machine code..However I've only done a bare introduction to x86assembly ( i only know LC-3 and MIPS), I don't really possess the knowledge to do anything after getting the instructions, but this is what I got so far...

mov edx, 0x40
lea ecx, [edi-0x32]
xor ebx, ebx
inc ebx (stdout)
xor eax, eax
add al, 0x4  
int 0x80
xor ebx,ebx
inc ebx
xor edx,edx
inc edx
push 0xa
lea ecx,[esp]
mov eax, 0x4
int 0x80            
xor ebx,ebx
xor eax,eax
inc eax
int 0x80        

yeah firetruck this, I've actually never heard of the GCHQ, but I feel like if you have the skillset to be a cybersecurity agent working for the UK gov, why not go MI6?  Probably a lot better salary for a governmental job, and plus, it's freakin MI6

[nomemory]

The answer is obviously 21, half of 42

Why is it obviously 21? I can get 42 but...

[Jd-]

Off the top of my head, I bet it's something like "Pr0t3ct!on#cyber_security@12*12.2011+".

(Yeah, some peeps apparently figured it out a bit back)