For several years now, a mysterious networking organization has been challenging puzzle lovers to crack ciphers. What is the Cicada 3301 - just an online game, an invitation to the ranks of underground hacker groups or a selection of talented candidates for the special services?
It all started on January 4, 2012, when visitors to the well-known 4chan discovered a post with a picture that was white typed text on a black background.
The text read: “Hello. We are looking for individuals with high intelligence. For this we have developed a test. There is a hidden message in this image. Find it and it will show you how to find us. We look forward to those few who will manage to go all the way. Good luck. 3301 ".
Visitors to this anonymous image board, which usually features hooligan and semi-pornographic pictures, began to actively discuss the unusual image, and many came to the conclusion that perhaps this is how the NSA is looking for potential employees. Indeed, the method is not new: special services monitor hacker events and forums in order to attract talented youth to the civil service. And during World War II, British intelligence agencies searched for promising employees using crossword puzzles in the Daily Telegraph newspaper. One way or another, the picture attracted attention, it was re-posted on other forums - and the enthusiasts set about deciphering.
Some of the commenters suggested opening the image in a simple text editor WordPad, and in the resulting text, the only meaningful message was found: “TIBERIVS CLAVDIVS CAESAR says“ lxxt> 33m2mqkyv2gsq3q = w] O2ntk ”, that is,“ Tiberius Claudius Caesar says “lxxt> = w] O2ntk ””. Thanks to the obvious hint, it turned out to be easy to decipher the code: it was the so-called Caesar code, or shift cipher, in which each individual character in the text is replaced by a character located in the alphabet for some constant number of positions to the left or to the right. For those who know that Tiberius Claudius was the fourth Roman emperor, it was logical to assume that shifting the text back four letters would work, which resulted in the website address on the Internet.
A person who came to this address was greeted by an image of a duck with a mocking inscription: “OOPS just lures here. It looks like you couldn't figure out how to retrieve the message. " The clue to the puzzle was hidden in the English text: the words "guess" and "out" led to the name of the steganographic program OutGuess, which allows you to reveal data hidden in ordinary digital images. Having run the picture through OutGuess, it was possible to get a sequence of numbers marked "This is a book code" and a link to one of the "boards" of the popular site Reddit, where the visitor was greeted with a code that consisted of numbers used in antiquity by the Maya Indians, many periodically added encrypted lines and two pictures with the words "Welcome" and "Problems?"
Each picture was hidden by a message, which could also be read using OutGuess. The first said that from now on each message will have a PGP signature, and this signature was given, and the second said: “The key was always in front of your eyes. This is not a quest for the Holy Grail. Stop complicating things. Good luck. 3301 ".
The Mayan numbers were the key to deciphering the lines: here the Caesar code was again used, and as a result, an excerpt from the poem about King Arthur, which is part of the medieval Welsh collection of stories "Mabinogion", appeared before our eyes. Applying to the decoded lines the "book code" given earlier (the first number is the line number, the second is the ordinal number of the letter), it was possible to get the following text: "Call us at us tele phone numBer two one four three nine oh nine six oh eight" , that is, "Call us on the phone number 2143909608".
An answering machine answered the phone with the following message: “Very good. You did it. Three primes are associated with the original final.jpg image. 3301 is one of them. You have to find the other two. To go to the next level, multiply these numbers together and add .com. Good luck. Bye".
The original image was 509 x 503 pixels, and both of these numbers are prime. Multiplying them with 3301, it was possible to get the address 845145127.com , where the visitor was greeted by an image of a cicada and a countdown counter.
Another message hidden in the picture read: “You did your best to get this far. Patience is a virtue. Come back here at 5:00 pm on Monday January 9, 2012 UTC. "
After the countdown stopped, the site was updated, and another message was hidden in the cicada image, containing 14 GPS coordinates for various points on the globe, including Warsaw, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Arizona, California, New Orleans, Miami, Hawaii and Sydney. The scale of the event amazed even the most distrustful of participants! Moreover, enthusiasts were quickly found who checked all 14 points.
At all the specified addresses, there were street lamp posts, to which a poster with a cicada image and a QR code was attached. Various versions of messages offered to decipher the next "book code", this time in the book "Agrippa" by William Gibson, which eventually led to the address sq6wmgv2zcsrix6t.onion on the TOR network. The vast majority of those visiting this address received the message “We need the best, not the followers,” and a few weeks later, the following appeared on 4chan and Reddit: “Hello. We found those we were looking for. This is how our month-long journey ends. Until".
It is not known for certain what those, whom the organizers of this "trip" were looking for, faced. Some who came to the site address in the TOR network were offered to register an anonymous Hotmail mailbox, to which the next task was sent. However, since there were no people willing to share their successes on the Web, what happened next remains a mystery.
Having driven the picture through the already well-known OutGuess program, those interested received another "book cipher", which pointed to the "Book of the Law", written at the beginning of the 20th century by the famous British occultist Aleister Crowley, and after decryption led to a 130-megabyte archive on Dropbox. The archive contained an image of a Linux boot disk, which, after booting, displayed a sequence of primes on the screen.
Then a few more tasks followed, mp3-files, a Twitter account, Anglo-Saxon runes, gematria, new GPS coordinates all over the world from Moscow to Okinawa and again onion addresses in the TOR network came into play. Those who successfully passed the "public" tests were again asked to create a completely new anonymous mailbox and PGP key and upload this data to the organizer's server. The winners were to receive personalized assignments to this address. All the rest of the answer was silence.
As in previous years, the key is contained in the text written in white letters on a black background. This time the text contains the following message: “Hello. Epiphany is upon you. Your pilgrimage has begun. Enlightenment awaits. Good luck. 3301. ", which can be translated as" Hello. Behold the Epiphany. Your pilgrimage has begun. Enlightenment awaits. Good luck. 3301. "
Agree, it reads like some cyberpunk "Da Vinci Code" and is very reminiscent of a very sophisticated game in an alternate reality (ARG). The main principle of such a game is maximum realism: all the objects mentioned, including texts, books, addresses and telephones, must exist in reality, and the behavior of the participants is controlled by leaders hiding in an unknown place who communicate with the players exclusively by code messages. However, it is still unclear who and for what purpose came up with the Cicada 3301: no one tried to somehow make money on it or advertise any films or goods.
If this is not a game, then what? Recruiting applicants for hacker universities? The use of onion addresses in the anonymous TOR network hints at the so-called deep Internet, in which, however, not only network anarchists and criminals live, but also quite respectable databases of scientific institutions and libraries. The authorities of the Chilean province of Los Andes hastened to declare Cicada 3301 a hacker group involved in illegal activities, for which there is no objective evidence and that the "cicadas" were denied in their next message.
It is also quite legitimate to assume that the Cicada 3301 is a project of the special services to attract talented youth to cooperation. This version is supported by the scale of the game, which was celebrated on almost all continents - although, on the other hand, real enthusiasts can do more than that.
So far, it has not been possible to reliably establish what the Cicada 3301 is. At the same time, the "game" has staunch fans, leading a detailed 76-page online encyclopedia , from which you can learn in detail about everything related to the Cicada 3301, including all kinds of rumors and guesses. They also regularly communicate on a separate IRC channel Freenode, so everyone intrigued by this mystery can safely join them.
Thanks for attention!
It all started on January 4, 2012, when visitors to the well-known 4chan discovered a post with a picture that was white typed text on a black background.
The text read: “Hello. We are looking for individuals with high intelligence. For this we have developed a test. There is a hidden message in this image. Find it and it will show you how to find us. We look forward to those few who will manage to go all the way. Good luck. 3301 ".
Visitors to this anonymous image board, which usually features hooligan and semi-pornographic pictures, began to actively discuss the unusual image, and many came to the conclusion that perhaps this is how the NSA is looking for potential employees. Indeed, the method is not new: special services monitor hacker events and forums in order to attract talented youth to the civil service. And during World War II, British intelligence agencies searched for promising employees using crossword puzzles in the Daily Telegraph newspaper. One way or another, the picture attracted attention, it was re-posted on other forums - and the enthusiasts set about deciphering.
Some of the commenters suggested opening the image in a simple text editor WordPad, and in the resulting text, the only meaningful message was found: “TIBERIVS CLAVDIVS CAESAR says“ lxxt> 33m2mqkyv2gsq3q = w] O2ntk ”, that is,“ Tiberius Claudius Caesar says “lxxt> = w] O2ntk ””. Thanks to the obvious hint, it turned out to be easy to decipher the code: it was the so-called Caesar code, or shift cipher, in which each individual character in the text is replaced by a character located in the alphabet for some constant number of positions to the left or to the right. For those who know that Tiberius Claudius was the fourth Roman emperor, it was logical to assume that shifting the text back four letters would work, which resulted in the website address on the Internet.
A person who came to this address was greeted by an image of a duck with a mocking inscription: “OOPS just lures here. It looks like you couldn't figure out how to retrieve the message. " The clue to the puzzle was hidden in the English text: the words "guess" and "out" led to the name of the steganographic program OutGuess, which allows you to reveal data hidden in ordinary digital images. Having run the picture through OutGuess, it was possible to get a sequence of numbers marked "This is a book code" and a link to one of the "boards" of the popular site Reddit, where the visitor was greeted with a code that consisted of numbers used in antiquity by the Maya Indians, many periodically added encrypted lines and two pictures with the words "Welcome" and "Problems?"
Each picture was hidden by a message, which could also be read using OutGuess. The first said that from now on each message will have a PGP signature, and this signature was given, and the second said: “The key was always in front of your eyes. This is not a quest for the Holy Grail. Stop complicating things. Good luck. 3301 ".
The Mayan numbers were the key to deciphering the lines: here the Caesar code was again used, and as a result, an excerpt from the poem about King Arthur, which is part of the medieval Welsh collection of stories "Mabinogion", appeared before our eyes. Applying to the decoded lines the "book code" given earlier (the first number is the line number, the second is the ordinal number of the letter), it was possible to get the following text: "Call us at us tele phone numBer two one four three nine oh nine six oh eight" , that is, "Call us on the phone number 2143909608".
An answering machine answered the phone with the following message: “Very good. You did it. Three primes are associated with the original final.jpg image. 3301 is one of them. You have to find the other two. To go to the next level, multiply these numbers together and add .com. Good luck. Bye".
The original image was 509 x 503 pixels, and both of these numbers are prime. Multiplying them with 3301, it was possible to get the address 845145127.com , where the visitor was greeted by an image of a cicada and a countdown counter.
Another message hidden in the picture read: “You did your best to get this far. Patience is a virtue. Come back here at 5:00 pm on Monday January 9, 2012 UTC. "
After the countdown stopped, the site was updated, and another message was hidden in the cicada image, containing 14 GPS coordinates for various points on the globe, including Warsaw, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Arizona, California, New Orleans, Miami, Hawaii and Sydney. The scale of the event amazed even the most distrustful of participants! Moreover, enthusiasts were quickly found who checked all 14 points.
At all the specified addresses, there were street lamp posts, to which a poster with a cicada image and a QR code was attached. Various versions of messages offered to decipher the next "book code", this time in the book "Agrippa" by William Gibson, which eventually led to the address sq6wmgv2zcsrix6t.onion on the TOR network. The vast majority of those visiting this address received the message “We need the best, not the followers,” and a few weeks later, the following appeared on 4chan and Reddit: “Hello. We found those we were looking for. This is how our month-long journey ends. Until".
It is not known for certain what those, whom the organizers of this "trip" were looking for, faced. Some who came to the site address in the TOR network were offered to register an anonymous Hotmail mailbox, to which the next task was sent. However, since there were no people willing to share their successes on the Web, what happened next remains a mystery.
2013
But the story doesn't end there. Exactly one year later, on January 4, 2013, a new message appeared on 4chan in a familiar style - in white on a black background. It said: “Hello again. We keep looking for intellectuals. The first key is hidden in this image. Find him and he will show you how to find us. We look forward to those few who will manage to go all the way. Good luck. 3301 ".Having driven the picture through the already well-known OutGuess program, those interested received another "book cipher", which pointed to the "Book of the Law", written at the beginning of the 20th century by the famous British occultist Aleister Crowley, and after decryption led to a 130-megabyte archive on Dropbox. The archive contained an image of a Linux boot disk, which, after booting, displayed a sequence of primes on the screen.
Then a few more tasks followed, mp3-files, a Twitter account, Anglo-Saxon runes, gematria, new GPS coordinates all over the world from Moscow to Okinawa and again onion addresses in the TOR network came into play. Those who successfully passed the "public" tests were again asked to create a completely new anonymous mailbox and PGP key and upload this data to the organizer's server. The winners were to receive personalized assignments to this address. All the rest of the answer was silence.
2014
But this is not the end of the story, since on January 4, 2014, another picture was published, though this time not on 4chan, but on imgur. Over the weekend, about a dozen images were posted on the public page of 4chan.org, many claimed to be the new key to the puzzle, but they were soon exposed.As in previous years, the key is contained in the text written in white letters on a black background. This time the text contains the following message: “Hello. Epiphany is upon you. Your pilgrimage has begun. Enlightenment awaits. Good luck. 3301. ", which can be translated as" Hello. Behold the Epiphany. Your pilgrimage has begun. Enlightenment awaits. Good luck. 3301. "
Agree, it reads like some cyberpunk "Da Vinci Code" and is very reminiscent of a very sophisticated game in an alternate reality (ARG). The main principle of such a game is maximum realism: all the objects mentioned, including texts, books, addresses and telephones, must exist in reality, and the behavior of the participants is controlled by leaders hiding in an unknown place who communicate with the players exclusively by code messages. However, it is still unclear who and for what purpose came up with the Cicada 3301: no one tried to somehow make money on it or advertise any films or goods.
If this is not a game, then what? Recruiting applicants for hacker universities? The use of onion addresses in the anonymous TOR network hints at the so-called deep Internet, in which, however, not only network anarchists and criminals live, but also quite respectable databases of scientific institutions and libraries. The authorities of the Chilean province of Los Andes hastened to declare Cicada 3301 a hacker group involved in illegal activities, for which there is no objective evidence and that the "cicadas" were denied in their next message.
It is also quite legitimate to assume that the Cicada 3301 is a project of the special services to attract talented youth to cooperation. This version is supported by the scale of the game, which was celebrated on almost all continents - although, on the other hand, real enthusiasts can do more than that.
So far, it has not been possible to reliably establish what the Cicada 3301 is. At the same time, the "game" has staunch fans, leading a detailed 76-page online encyclopedia , from which you can learn in detail about everything related to the Cicada 3301, including all kinds of rumors and guesses. They also regularly communicate on a separate IRC channel Freenode, so everyone intrigued by this mystery can safely join them.
Thanks for attention!
