On May 5, people of a very rare profession celebrate their professional holiday. These are ransomware.
In 1921, on this day, according to the Decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR, a cryptographic service was created to protect information and transfer data outside the country.
The birth of the science itself - cryptography - began much earlier. In fact, back in the days when a person learned to clothe his thoughts in words and write them down using certain symbols. The Roman emperor Gaius Julius Caesar was a rather gifted cryptographer of his era, as evidenced by historical sources telling about the emperor's use of various systems, as they would say now, of information encryption. Such ancient Greek thinkers as Aristotle and Pythagoras made a great contribution to the development of this science.
In ancient times, cryptograms were often used in literary and philosophical environments. The well-known Leonardo da Vinci is the inventor of the first encryption apparatus. And the term "da Vinci code", thanks to the famous book and its film adaptation, has become a model of something unsolved in the field of information display.
Medieval writers were trained in this business and published new books in encrypted form. Enlightened individuals communicated with each other through cryptograms. During the medieval Inquisition, philosophers and scientists could not openly publish their work, so in order to preserve their ideas, they had to use the most sophisticated encryption methods. It got to the point that encryption methods changed so quickly and often that after the death of the authors of the texts, their works remained undeciphered for a long time.
Some remain so to this day. One example of an undeciphered material is the so-called Voynich manuscript, named after its owner. Several generations of specialists and amateurs fought over the deciphering of this text, until the idea was expressed that the manuscript was an imitation of a meaningful text, the purpose of which is unknown. There are more and more supporters of the idea of mystification when creating a manuscript every day, since even modern computer programs cannot grasp the symbolic patterns in the text.
With the advent of radio and telegraph in the 20th century, ciphering has become very popular. In this regard, new encryption methods began to be invented. One of the most important vectors in the development of encryption is associated with military affairs.
During the Great Patriotic War, Soviet engineers made a breakthrough in the field of encryption. From 1941 to 1947, a total of over 1.6 million encrypted telegrams and codograms were transmitted. The load on communication channels sometimes reached 1.5 thousand telegrams per day. This stream made it possible to receive the most important information in the shortest possible time, which influenced the efficiency of decision-making.
The military ransomware had to work in exceptional conditions: under fire, in trenches and dugouts. In accordance with the instructions of the General Staff, they were provided with increased security, but it also happened that, instead of guards, the cipher put a can of gasoline in front of him, put grenades next to him and took a pistol out of the holster. Life was secondary. Primarily - material that went through encryption or decryption.
By the way, it is known from the partially declassified archives of the Wehrmacht that the German command promised a generous reward for the capture of a Russian cipher officer: an iron cross, a vacation to Germany and an estate in the Crimea.
During the war years, Soviet ransomware did an enormous amount of work. By the spring of 1942, about 50 thousand German telegrams and radiograms had been deciphered. The most important role was played by the Soviet cryptographic service in the victory of the Soviet troops in the battle for Moscow. The developers of the ciphers ensured the essential security of the Soviet communication lines, and the decryptors successfully intercepted and decrypted the enemy's cryptograms.
The heroic and hard work of the cipher service during the war was highly praised by the command. For exemplary fulfillment of government assignments only at the beginning of the war, 54 specialists were awarded orders and medals.
In total, cryptographic schools have trained and sent more than 5 thousand specialists to the front.
In the USSR, cryptography was a completely closed discipline that was used exclusively for the needs of defense and state security, and therefore there was no need for public coverage of achievements in this area. The archives of this direction store thousands of documents classified as "secret", and therefore information about the numerous merits of the Soviet cryptographic military school is not available to the public.
Currently, cryptographers are engaged in the development of cipher systems and encryption programs. They are truly attentive, diligent and hardworking people. Their work requires the highest concentration, because even what an ordinary person seems like a trifle can play a role.
The names of some cryptographers and security software developers are widely known. Among them is Evgeny Kaspersky, who at one time graduated from the 4th (technical) faculty of the Higher School of the KGB (now the Institute of Cryptography, Communications and Informatics of the Academy of the FSB of Russia). But most of the names are understandably unknown to a wide audience.
The formation of the domestic cryptographic service took place over many decades. The principles and foundations of this work, its forms and methods, techniques and methods were developed by several generations of Soviet and Russian cryptographers. In this history, as in the history of any science, there were victories and defeats, successes and failures, great and tragic pages. All of them are our national treasure, our pride, memory, pain and victory.
