The German military used the Enigma to great effect during WWII. As the operator typed each letter of their message into the machine, a letter on the board would light up to produce, letter by letter, a scrambled message. The machine looked like a typewriter, but instead of typing out letters on a sheet of paper, it had a board of lights with one light for each letter of the alphabet. It was initially created for commercial and diplomatic use before the war, but the government later began developing versions with more powerful encryption exclusively for the military. The Enigma machine was a keyboard that scrambled messages in a way that could only be unscrambled by someone using an identical machine with identical settings somewhere else. This was why the German government developed the Enigma machine. In a war where everyone can hear what you’re saying, you need to speak in codes to transmit secret information. However, it was easy for enemies to hear those messages as well. Radio waves enabled the nations of WWII to communicate with their troops over vast distances. Intercept an enemy’s message and you’ll know their moves before they do. The element of surprise is crucial in war. What follows is the fascinating story of how clever spies, daring commandos, brilliant mathematicians, and industrious engineers came together to crack Germany’s Enigma code machine… Codes, codebreaking, and war Even almost a century later, there are lessons we can learn here about modern cybersecurity. In doing so, they helped to defeat one of the greatest evils the world has ever seen and created the precursor to the modern computer.
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