Okay, maybe it wasn't that much of a mystery. In fact, it took a little more than three hours for Danger Room reader jemelehill to figure out the odd string of letters and numbers in the logo of the U.S. military's new Cyber Command. Turns out, it's the new unit's mission statement, translated into 32 digits with the md5 cryptographic hash:

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.

Eventually, other commenters figured it out (especially after jemelehill's solution made it to all the databases of cracked hashes). But that didn't stop folks from offering their own, shall we say, creative guesses, in order to win one of two coveted prizes: a Danger Room T-shirt or a ticket to the International Spy Museum.

* "If you can read this, send your resume to jobs@nsa.gov." * "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." * "If the intelligence community is a family, think of us as the uncle no one talks about." * "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" * "In God We Trust All Others We Monitor" * "Why do people keep posting the wrong answers when someone solved it like 20 comments ago?"

Yahoo News, the Associated Press, Agence Presse France, Slashdot, El Reg and the websites of the Washington Post and the* L.A. Times* all joined in the fun. The hubbub even provoked this response from an official Defense Department blog:

I cracked the code, but you can keep my T-shirt. (Wired.com shirts aren't exactly babe magnets.)

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