Friday, December 2, 2011

GCHQ challenges codebreakers via social networks- By: Sanna Nasser Sheikh






UK intelligence agency GCHQ has launched a code-cracking competition. It is helpful to create new modes of fascination for new talent. The organization has requested for budding aspirant’s proposals to solve a visual code sent at an unbranded separate website. It has also been broadcast to social media sites, blogs and forums as a great challenge.

According to sources the purpose of the campaign is to highlight and increase the profile of GCHQ to an audience.

"The target audience for this particular campaign is one that may not typically be attracted to traditional advertising methods and may be unaware that GCHQ is recruiting for these kinds of roles.”

"Their skills may be ideally suited to our work and yet they may not understand how they could apply them to a working environment, particularly one where they have the opportunity to contribute so much."

The competition inaugurated on 3 November and will continue until 12 December.

GCHQ said that once the code was cracked individuals would be presented with a keyword to enter into a form field. They would then be redirected to the agency's recruitment website.

In initiatives perspective, GCHQ claimed that this was the first time this sort of challenge had ever been conducted by an organization to target these sorts of skills. However, the agency has used unusual recruitment methods in the past.

In 2009, it placed video content, themes and downloadable pictures on the Xbox Live network which appeared during Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed and other video games.

Two years earlier, it targeted gamers by placing digital posters in online titles including Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas and Splinter Cell Double Agent.

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