Cicada 3301: a secret hacker community or just a game?

For the past three years, a mysterious network organization has been setting challenging puzzles for puzzle lovers to solve puzzles. What is Cicada 3301 - just an online game, an invitation to join the ranks of underground hacker groups or the selection of talented candidates for special services?

It all started on January 4, 2012, when visitors to the well-known 4chan discovered a post with a picture that was a white printed text on a black background.

The text read: “Hi. 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 can go all the way. Good luck. 3301 ".


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Visitors to this anonymous imageboard, on which hooligan and semi-pornographic pictures are usually laid out, began to actively discuss the unusual image, and many have come to the conclusion that perhaps the NSA is looking for potential employees. Indeed, the method is not new: the secret services track hacker events and forums with the goal of attracting talented young people to the civil service. And during the Second World War, British intelligence agencies were looking for promising employees using crosswords in the Daily Telegraph newspaper. Anyway, the picture attracted attention, it was reposted in other forums - and enthusiasts took up decoding.

Some of the commentators suggested to open the image in a simple WordPad text editor, and in the resulting text found only meaningful message: «TIBERIVS CLAVDIVS CAESAR says« lxxt> 33m2mqkyv2gsq3q = w] O2ntk »», that is, "Tiberius Claudius Caesar says" lxxt> 33m2mqkyv2gsq3q = w] O2ntk ”. Thanks to an obvious hint, deciphering the code turned out to be easy: it was the so-called Caesar code, or shift cipher, in which every single character in the text is replaced with a symbol located in the alphabet with a fixed 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 the text would be shifted four letters back, the result of which was the website’s address on the Internet.



The one who came to this address was greeted with the image of a duck with a mocking inscription: “OPS is simply luring here. Looks like you couldn't figure out how to extract the message. ” The key to the riddle was hidden in the English text: the words "guess" and "out" led to the name of the steganographic program OutGuess, which allows revealing data that are hidden in ordinary digital images. Having banished 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 Reddit website, where the visitor was greeted with a code that consisted of numbers used in ancient Maya Indians, many periodically added encrypted lines and two pictures with the words "Welcome" and "Problems?".




In each picture was hidden by the message, which can also be read using OutGuess. The first one said that from now on each message would have a PGP signature, and this signature was given, and the second one said: “The key was always before your eyes. This is not the quest for the Holy Grail. Stop complicating things. Good luck. 3301 ".

The Maya figures were the key to deciphering the lines: Caesar’s code was again used here, and as a result, an excerpt from the poem about King Arthur, which is part of the medieval Welsh collection of Mabinogion, appeared before his eyes. Applying the “book code” given earlier to the decoded lines (the first number is the line number, the second is the letter sequence number), you could get the following text: “Call us phone number one three three nine oh nine six oh eight” , that is, "Call us at the phone number 2143909608."



The answering machine was filming the receiver with the following message: “Very good. You did it. Three primes are associated with the original image final.jpg. 3301 one of them. You have to find the other two. To move to the next level, multiply these numbers together and add .com. Good luck. Goodbye".

The size of the original image was 509 × 503 pixels, and both of these numbers are simple. Multiplying them with 3301, you could get the address 845145127.com , where the visitor was met by a cicada image and a countdown counter.

The next message, hidden in the picture, read: “You have tried hard to go so far. Patience is a virtue. Return here at 5:00 pm on Monday, January 9, 2012 UT. ”

After the countdown stopped, the site was updated, and in the cicada image another message was hidden, containing 14 GPS coordinates of different points on the globe, including Warsaw, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Arizona, California, New Orleans, Miami, and Hawaii Sydney. The scale of the event impressed even the most incredulous participants! And, moreover, enthusiasts were quickly found who checked all 14 points.



At all the addresses indicated, there were street lampposts to which a poster with a picture of a cicada and a QR code was attached. Various variants of messages suggested deciphering 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 overwhelming majority of those who came to this address received the message “We need the best, not followers,” and a few weeks later, at 4chan and Reddit, the following appeared: “Hello. We found those we were looking for. So our month-long journey ends. Until".

What those who were looking for by the organizers of this “journey” faced is not known for certain. Some of those who came to the site address on the TOR network were offered to register an anonymous Hotmail inbox to which another 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 does not end there. Exactly one year later, on January 4, 2013, a new message appeared in 4chan in a familiar style - white font on a black background. It said: “Hello again. We continue to look 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 can go all the way. Good luck. 3301 ".



Having banished the picture through the already well-known OutGuess program, those interested got another “book code”, 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 decrypting it led to a 130-megabyte archive on Dropbox. The archive contained a Linux boot disk image that, after booting, displayed a sequence of prime numbers on the screen.



Then several more tasks followed, mp3 files, a Twitter account, Anglo-Saxon runes, gematria, new GPS coordinates around the world from Moscow to Okinawa, and onion addresses in the TOR network entered the game. Having successfully passed the “publicly available” tests, it was again proposed to create a completely new anonymous mailbox and PGP key and upload this data to the server of the organizers. At this address, the winners were to receive personalized tasks. 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 published on the publicly accessible page on 4chan.org, many argued that this was a new key 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 kind of cyberpunk Da Vinci Code and very much resembles a very sophisticated game in alternative reality (ARG). The main principle of such a game is maximum realism: all the mentioned objects, including texts, books, addresses and telephones, must exist in reality, and the behavior of the participants is controlled by the leaders hiding where it is unknown who communicate with the players solely by code messages. However, it is still not clear who and for what purpose came up with Cicada 3301: no one tried to somehow make money on it or advertise some films or goods.

If this is not a game, then what? Recruitment to hacker universities? The use of onion addresses in the anonymous network TOR hints at the so-called deep Internet, in which, however, not only network anarchists and criminals dwell, but also quite respectable databases of scientific institutions and libraries. The authorities in the Chilean province of Los Andes were quick to announce Cicada 3301 as a hacker group involved in illegal activities, which is not objectively confirmed, and that the “cicadas” were refuted in their latest report.

The assumption that Cicada 3301 is a project of special services to attract talented young people to cooperation is also fully justified. The scale of the game, noted on almost all continents, speaks in favor of this version - although, on the other hand, real enthusiasts are not as powerful as such.

So far, it has not been possible to reliably establish what Cicada 3301 is. At the same time, the “game” has persistent fans leading a detailed 76-page online encyclopedia from which you can learn in detail about everything related to Cicada 3301, including all sorts of rumors and conjectures. They regularly communicate on a separate IRC-channel Freenode, so that everyone intrigued by this mystery can safely join them.

Partially taken from here .

PS If anyone is interested, I will translate the investigation of 2014.