I work in the information security industry, and I feel like I'm missing something but I really have to ask what these are relevant to.
Cryptography, which this appears to be a reduced form of is mostly tangential and very nuanced relative to the ciphers in this challenge. I often feel my line of work is grossly misrepresented by dizzying fields of esoteric numbers and references to ancient cryptography when I'm happy to find myself many of my days engrossed in the security characteristics of some powerful technology used right now in the real world.
I moved from engineering to security, but if this was my only interaction with security, I'm not sure I'd have been interested.
Edit: if you're interested in real crypto challenges, try http://cryptopals.com/ and read Cryptography Engineering, which is a wonderful read that goes over not only the cryptography but also the principles common across the many specialisations of the infosec industry
1. http://simonsingh.net/cryptography/cipher-challenge/the-ciph...
2. http://www.amazon.com/The-Code-Book-Science-Cryptography/dp/...
EDIT: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB4D701646DAF0817
Apparently it's a serious recruiting exercise for various companies - which is frankly terrifying for anyone who knows anything about infosec but isn't a cybercriminal, terrorist, or foreign hostile.
Have you never worked a custom written crypto algo in your line of work ? For example, countries' army are the bane of sysadmins since they implement about every standard of networking since computer exists.
Working in infosec, you hardly have to crack an akbash cipher, but I'm pretty sure you'd had to understand a closed source algorithm.
Evidently I don't have the brains for cybersecurity. My clients should be just fine with their telnet-enabled/remote-root-accessible servers until someone who can descramble Wingdings riddles can save them.
Right now there's a Hacky Easter competition running which you can participate in for free: http://hackyeaster.hacking-lab.com/hackyeaster/challenges.ht...
It's not a recruitment operation. They're just some fun puzzles which are accessible to laypeople. It shows the fundamentals of cryptanalysis in a way that a casual reader can understand and even have a crack at solving.
Someone mentioned in another comment that Simon Singh's "The Code Book" starts in a similar way and they're dead on. You don't introduce someone to a subject by posing problems based on constructs they don't yet have the tools or context understand. The history of the field informs its current state - cryptography and cryptanalysis have a very rich and fascinating history.
Here's NSA's internal course list.[1] Not much about puzzles.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines