Stanford Engineering Puzzle

November 2006

E-mail phishing scams, in which hackers lure you to a doppleganger of a legitimate site to snare your password as you unwittingly log in, are a menace and a scourge. Hopefully a tool called PwdHash, developed by CS Professor John Mitchell and CS and EE Associate Professor Dan Boneh and their students, will relegate phishing to being a mere historical curiosity. In August, Boneh and Mitchell won a Computerworld Horizon Award for the software. You can earn some kudos below by playing this month's version of our code puzzle.

Directions for puzzle

In the puzzle your goal is to arrange the columns and rows such that you spell out a sentence describing phishing. One important note: there should be two spaces between each word. When you get all four words unscrambled, a "secret word" will be revealed. For fun we will post (below) the names of ten alumni who successfully complete the puzzle and e-mail the secret word in the subject line to staff member Marge Kastner. She'll post entry number 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, etc. up to 91.

You must have Flash installed to run this puzzle, which was designed by Scott Kim of Shufflebrain and programmed by Larry Doyle of Cyberiandesign.

"Winning" entries

All 110 entries in less than 24 hours are amazing! Here's the ones that came in at the right times..

• 1) Richard Thill
• 11) Mark Kinnaman
• 21) Navid Yazdani
• 31) Rachel Weinstein
• 41) Trevor Lfothouse
• 51) Richard Chang
• 61) Jack Lin
• 71) Olivia Williamson
• 81) Kevin Koehler
• 91) Avis Austin

Do you want to try your hand at past puzzles, go to our Archive page.