Cryptanalyst

If you grew up deciphering coded messages on cereal boxes, you know that not everything is what it seems: A flash of light at night could be Morse code from a stranded traveler; gibberish among kids could be a secret “parent-proof” language; and a jumble of random letters could be an urgent confidential message from a Spy to his government.

Thanks to technology, secret communication is more common — and more sophisticated — today than ever before. Demand is high, therefore, for people who can “crack the codes.”

A Cryptanalyst is one of those people, paid by military, political, and law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI, as well as private companies, to analyze and unravel secret codes, which are frequently used by governments, businesses, hackers, and criminals to securely transmit sensitive — and often, nefarious — information.

Essentially, it’s your job as a Cryptanalyst to “unencrypt” encrypted data, known as a “cipher,” then translate it into readable script, known as “plain text.” While your colleagues, Cryptographers, write hidden messages, it’s up to you to read them — without the assistance of a key, which means you spend your days not only deciphering codes, but also building the systems needed to crack them in the first place. It’s kind of like speaking English and discovering the ancient Egyptians’ hieroglyphics: Before you can read the entire message, you’ve got to create a dictionary by determining what each symbol means.

Using computer science (algorithms), math (probabilities), and intuition (good, old-fashioned guesswork) to electronically gather and secure intelligence, as a Cryptanalyst you’re basically a human decoder ring, fighting crime by cracking codes!