A mathematician from Princeton, N.J., has cracked a cipher contained in a 200-year-old letter sent to Thomas Jefferson by a friend. The cipher had resisted all solution attempts over the years, until Lawren Smithline got hold of it a couple of years ago. A group of researchers has developed a new attack on the AES encryption algorithm. Ron Rivest and his team have withdrawn the MD6 algorithm from the NIST competition to find a replacement for the SHA-1 family of hash functions.
Source: https://threatpost.com/new-aes-attack-200-year-old-cipher-key-big-week-crypto-070209/72824/