It read: "sknab roftuoliab dnoces fo knirb no rollecnahC 9002/naJ/30 semiT ehT”.

Complete gibberish right? Well someone eventually cracked it. However I have tried to do some research on who this was but I haven't yielded any results. The general consensus is that this message translated into:

“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”.

It took roughly 10 years for this to be unscrambled and made sense of with several experts said to be on the case. I'm unsure when the message was first discovered and when work commenced. As you can imagine this took a very long time but probably didn't take as long as 10 years. It probably went unnoticed for a few years.