Throw the book at him! [Part 1]
One way to attack a substitution cipher is to guess what part of the plain text solution might be, “plugging” it into where you think it might fit in the cipher text, and then seeing if you can get more…
Lafferty vs the ciphers
Retired Vallejo officer Lyndon Lafferty has been getting a lot of attention for his book in which he claims to know who the Zodiac killer was. The numerous criticisms of his claims aren’t mentioned by the various news stories, but…
Is the 340-character cipher real?
Over forty years of frustration have passed since the Zodiac killer first sent his mysterious 340-character cipher to the San Francisco Chronicle. It only took a week for two teachers to solve his previous cipher. But many thousands of people,…
Create your own ciphers
Mike Cole of ZodiacRevisited.com has released a tool that lets you create your own Zodiac-like cipher texts using homophonic substitution: Cipher Generator. Screenshot: I think this tool is very useful for creating test ciphers that can be fed into cipher…
Zodiac’s favorite words
The killer’s first cipher was solved rather quickly by amateur codebreakers because they guessed that the killer would use words such as “I” and “kill”. Can similar guesswork help us solve the unsolved 340-character cipher? This is something people have…
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