U-Boat's Enigma Cracked With PC's

Sixty years after the end of World War II, a network of several thousand PCs has cracked a message enciphered with the famous Enigma machine. The M4 Message Breaking Project, started by Stefan Krah, a German amateur cryptographer, in January, took on three messages intercepted by British code-breakers during WWII, but never cracked by the famous cryptology facility at Bletchley Park. The code breakers at Bletchley included computing pioneer Alan Turing and used a combination of human intelligence, guesswork, and elementary computing, called "bombs" to decipher messages." At various times, Bletchley Park could read virtually all Enigma-ciphered messages to and from U-boats at sea, which was instrumental in locating and sinking the submarines, or steering convoys away from U-boat wolfpacks.

Source - Internet Week