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German Enigma operators in WW2 were told always to send a certain number of messages per day to make it harder to perform traffic analysis. One bored operator sent a message composed entirely of "W" repeated 4000 times (or so).

One on-the-ball analyst noticed a message that had no "W"s in it, and deduced what had been sent[0]. That allowed the daily settings to be cracked, and thus all messages for that day.

[0] Enigma has a weakness in that no letter can be encrypted as itself[1].

[1] Enigma is effectively a "one-time-pad" where the pad is a pseudo-random sequence determined by the daily settings.



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