Click for larger image.

By Petty Officer 2nd Class Elliott Fabrizio

Did you know there is a secret message in U.S. Cyber Command’s logo?

A close inspection of the logo’s inner gold ring will reveal this 32-character code: 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a.

A Washington Post headline asks, ‘Can you crack the Cyber Command code?’, and Wired.com offers a free t-shirt to the first one to accurately crack the code.

With that incentive, guesses poured into Wired.com’s comments bar. People guessed everything from “in God we trust” to “Soylent Green is people”. Well, I cracked the code, but you can keep my t-shirt. (Wired.com shirts aren’t exactly babe magnets.)

The code is Cyber Command’s mission statement:

USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.

The encryption uses an old message-digest algorithm, called MD5, created back in 1991. You can create MD5 hash from any string of 256 characters or less. In short, you can make one of those 32-digit codes (MD5 hash) from anything ranging from the word “apple” to an elaborate mission statement.

(more…)