It lacks the romance of a furtive meeting in an Oxbridge college quad. But secret service chiefs hope this will be a far more effective method of recruiting the spies of the future.
GCHQ, the intelligence agency, has created an internet-based code-breaking game in an attempt track down candidates with the right skills for espionage in the computer age.
Rather than hoping to identify potential spies in the traditional feeding grounds of Oxford and Cambridge, it has launched a viral campaign on Facebook and Twitter that directs users to a website called “Can you crack it?”
Players who can crack a code are directed to the GCHQ website and invited to apply for a job.
After following a link to canyoucrackit.co.uk, players are presented with a seemingly meaningless grid of 160 pairs of letters and numbers, and a countdown clock. They are given until midnight on 12 December to unscramble the numbers and correctly identify a secret word.
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