# Cryptic Christmas Message Ideas



## wrs (Dec 15, 2009)

Hallo,

Like me, my younger brother is well in to computing so for Christmas I have bought him the books 'The Art of Deception' and 'The Art of Intrusion' by Kevin Mitnick and William Simon.

He is well aware of the topics these books discuss, so for a bit of fun I thought I'd play a little game with him.

My idea is to include some form of cryptic message in each of the books, which would lead him on a treasure hunt around the house to finally locate his third gift ( a monkey ).

Currently i'm thinking of creating addendum inserts for each of the books, giving the impression that they are legit.

I'm not sure what to do for the first book ( deception ), but for the second ( intrusion ) I plan on adding a base64 encoded message with the path of a file I secretly placed on his computer. This file contains the first clue of the treasure hunt.

But I can't think of anything cool to use for the first book. I'd like it to be cryptic ( base64 again I guess ) but not tip him off that I am behind it. Hopefully he'll believe the first message is just an author's joke or something, so imagine his surprise when the second message refers to something on his computer!

Any suggestions?


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## chalbersma (Dec 16, 2009)

Don't get him a real monkey. It might die by the time he figures it out.


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