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The man who solved the mysterious cicada 3301 puzzle

Meet The Man Who Solved The Mysterious Cicada 3301 Puzzle. *From deepweb bes*

Two years ago, a cryptic message started appearing on message boards across the Internet. Claiming to seek "highly intelligent individuals," the Cicada 3301 puzzle challenged visitors to find a secret message hidden in the image that accompanied it. Just what is Cicada 3301? And what happens to those that solve the puzzle? To find out, we talked to the man who solved it.

When it showed up on January 4, 2012 the mysterious image contained a simple message in white text on a black background:
"Hello. We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in the image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few who will make it all the way through. Good luck."
It was signed "3301."

And so began the hunt to solve the mysterious Cicada 3301 puzzle, one that recurs each year and has left cryptoanalysts and hackers scratching their heads.

A MULTIFACETED ENIGMA

Joel Eriksson is one of the few known people to have actually solved it since the first challenge appeared online.
"I stumbled upon it on one of the image boards the first image was posted to in 2012," says Eriksson, a 34-year-old cryptosecurity researcher and developer from Sweden. "Unfortunately, I didn't see it until some time after it was originally posted, and thus had some catching up to do," Eriksson says. "Initially, I just thought it would be a nice little brainteaser. I've always been interested in anything that can challenge me, and I never give up. In the case of Cicada, the puzzle in question turned out to be a lot more than I thought it would be when I started it."
Tackling the puzzle would lead Eriksson to rely on a host of skills from steganograHphy to cryptography, to an understanding of ancient Mayan numerology and a familiarity with cyberpunk speculative fiction. As he worked his way from solving one piece of the puzzle to the next, the journey would lead him to discover that the answers lay not just in the digital domain, but in the real world: From clues left on the voicemail of a Texas telephone number to flyers taped to telephone poles in 14 cities around the world. The quest would ultimately return to the deepest layers of the digital world: the dark web.

FROM REDDIT TO TEXAS TO THE DARK WEB

To understand how hard Cicada is, one only needs to look at the complexity of each clue that leads to successive parts of the puzzle—all which need to be completed in order to solve the Cicada mystery.
From the first image that was posted, Eriksson used steganography software to extract a message encoded with a shift cipher, where each letter of the text actually corresponds to another letter. Once he decoded the cypher, it revealed a URL where another image of a duck was posted. Here, he used steganography tools to reveal a hidden book code of a list of two numbers separated by a colon. The book code led to a Reddit URL with Mayan numerals on the top of the page. Eriksson noticed that several posts by a user using a pseudonym seemed to consist of encoded text. This text was the "book" the book code could be used to decode. But to find the cypher he needed to find the key first, which he gleaned from translating the Mayan numerals.
The now decoded text of the anonymous Reddit user’s postings revealed two images, both of which Eriksson used steganography tools on to find hidden messages with riddles inside them. The answer to these riddles were strings of digits that was a phone number in Texas. Calling the phone number led to a voicemail that read, "Very good. You have done well. There are three prime numbers associated with the original final.jpg image. 3301 is one of them. You will have to find the other two. Multiply all three of these numbers together and add a .com to find the next step. Good luck. Goodbye."
Looking at the metadata of the image that started it all, Eriksson thought its height and width dimensions could be the other two numbers. He did the math and landed at a URL which had another image of a cicada and a countdown that told him when to return to the site.
When the countdown was over, the cicada image was replaced with strings of digits that looked like GPS coordinates. The coordinates led to telephone poles in countries around the world, including in Spain, Russia, America, France, Japan, and Poland. Due to geographic limitations, Eriksson had to rely on other people on the Cicada 3301 trail in those parts of the world. What the locals found were physical posters with images of a cicada and a QR code.
Eriksson scanned the QR code, which lead to another two images, inside of which were more hidden text, including text from what Eriksson found was the William Gibson poem Agrippa. Noting that the text referenced prime numbers, Eriksson surmised that perhaps the book code he used on the text found on Reddit might reveal where to go next if he used it on the Gibson poem. It worked. He was directed to an address on the anonymous Tor network.
However, by the time he arrived, Cicada 3301 had put up a message stating that they were disappointed in the groups of people that had formed to share parts of the puzzles they discovered without any one member completing all the steps along the way, as Eriksson had done.
Had Eriksson seen the first image as soon as everyone else did, and having solved the Cicada 3301 puzzle on his own, he would today know what laid beyond the Tor site Cicada had set up.
"It was quite disappointing," Eriksson says. "Especially considering that the people who registered in time were mostly ones that had not actually solved much of the puzzles themselves. People were sharing solutions and collaborating a bit too much."
But for Eriksson the time and effort it took him to beat Cicada weren’t a total loss. He solved every step of the world’s most baffling Internet enigma in just under three weeks and in the process gleaned a lot of insight into who or what Cicada 3301 is.