Security News > 2020 > December > Divers Pull Rare Surviving WWII Enigma Cipher Machine from Bottom of the Baltic

What they found instead is a treasured piece of computing history, a World War II-era German Enigma crypto machine, sunk to the bottom of the Baltic Sea to protect its precious technology from Allied forces.

The development of the Enigma Cipher machine and the life-and-death race to crack its code wasn't just crucial to deciding the outcome of World War II; it ushered in the modern computing age.

Because the Enigma's secure code was a guarded German secret, as Allied forced approached, the military was ordered to destroy them, leaving just 320 of them surviving today, out of the more than 25,000 built for the German army from 1929 through the end of WWII, according to Dan Perera, director of the Enigma Museum.

Huber said the Enigma was likely aboard one of 40 submarines sunk in the bay by the German Navy at the end of WWII. "We assume our Enigma went overboard in the course of events," he told Sophos.

"The first functioning computers were developed as part of the Allied efforts to break the Enigma codes and the codes of other German cipher machines during WWII.".

News URL

https://threatpost.com/divers-wwii-enigma-cipher-baltic/162045/