Operators who received the encoded message would need an Enigma of their own, as well as the precise starting positions of the sender’s rotors, to decode the message, according to Stephanie Pappas of Live Science. When users composed messages on Enigma machines, the devices’ rotors substituted new letters for each stroke in order to encrypt the message. “But I never dreamt that we would one day find one of the legendary Enigma machines.”
“I’ve made many exciting and strange discoveries in the past 20 years,” he tells Reuters. On assignment for the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), the team had been using sonar technology to scan for “ghost nets,” or abandoned fishing nets that pollute the oceans and pose a deadly threat to fish, seabirds and other marine mammals, per a statement.ĭivers happened across this WWII Enigma cipher machine while searching for abandoned fishing nets.Īs Huber notes, the group’s sonar equipment often detects strange objects on the seabed. The divers found the machine off the coast of northeast Germany in the Bay of Gelting, which is part of the Baltic Sea. As Agence France-Presse reports, the group’s find is a rare Enigma cipher machine used by Nazi Germany to transmit encrypted military communications during World War II. Similar to a typewriter, the device was indeed used for sending messages-in this case, of a dangerous and clandestine variety. “A colleague swam up and said: here’s a net there with an old typewriter in it,” lead diver Florian Huber tells the DPA news agency.
Last month, German divers scanning the Baltic seafloor for abandoned fishing nets happened upon a rare piece of history: a strange contraption with keys and a rotor, rusted and covered in algae but relatively intact.
0 kommentar(er)
