Originally Posted by mayonaise
since DES is an open standard, everyone in the world can have access to how DES messages are encrpyted. however it is so complicated, that decrypting it by hand is pretty much impossible. designing a machine to decrypt it has been done, but even with computing power today would take several days at the least to decipher the key used for encryption. so while technically possible to break DES encryption, several days is more than enough time for organizations to switch keys around and render the stolen key useless.
Useless except on every since message the cracker has waiting to be decrypted. Sure, it's easy to change things around afterwards but for sensitive information it's a horrible idea.