25715

well done, you've cracked this code! have you worked out how this message has been enciphered? the letter 'a' was mapped to 'd', 'b' to 'e' etc. this is called a caesar shift, with a shift of three letters in this case. we also made things a bit easier by leaving punctuation and the spaces between the words in. how did you decipher this? you may have tried looking for repeated three letter words such as 'the', or counted how many of each letter appeared in the ciphertext and guessed that the most common letter corresponds to 'e'. this second method is the basis of a method called frequency analysis and is very useful for monoalphabetic ciphers. if you know how to program, you can save yourself a lot of time by writing some code to do it for you! don't worry if you don't though, there are lots of ways you can do it. the 'find and replace' tool in a word processing program can be very useful, just make sure you don't change again the letters you've already replaced! one way around this is to turn the whole message into lower case, and then use capitals for the decrpyted message. the next message will be slightly harder, good luck!