An acquaintance of mine pointed me to a comic stip that had a task to perform cryptoanalyzis on the string !35452555844414548495D4. Stupid as I am I went ahead with the challenge.

The paper created while proceeding, don't worry, this is intended to look to general mess to most. I start off by writing the actual cipher text in order to have my focus on that at all times.

Due to the non-modulo-2 and the use of a non-alpha character !, I suspect a padding, but let us include it in the letter-frequency analysis anyways. The frequency analysis show a large amount of 4 and 5 used, which can suggest a two-dimentional, or diographical solution.

I went ahead and tried some mono-graphical solutions anyways (Caesar cipher) but they didn't result in anything useful.

Trying out the idea that ! Is a padding show a set of pairs where every pair end in 4 or 5, this suggest a matrix where 4 and 5 is used as one of the axes.

Now, let us look at the frequency analysis of the pairs, 84 show two times, which suggest, since I presume the answer is in English, that it is the letter e, the most common letter in the English language.

If you insert that into the possible solution string you get ----e---e--. Now, here is where you want to know how to play scrabble. Which possible solution could include the letter e in those two positions?

For some reason a possible answer came to me fairly quickly, 56 minutes after seeing the task the first time, "youneedhelp".

This sound right to come from a comic strip, so that is what I think is the answer to the puzzle. Keep in mind though, I have not heard anything from them yet, so I do not know if this indeed is the appropriate answer. The cryptogram is available at page 2.

Hopefully I will get the results back soon. It is a nice brain teaser anyways.