"I knew cicadas emerge only every prime number of years - 13, or 17 - to avoid synchronising with the life cycles of their predators," said Eriksson. Pictures of the cicada insect became a common motif. And the puzzles mutated in several directions: hexadecimal characters, reverse engineering, prime numbers. Suddenly, the encryption techniques jumped up a gear. Until now, Eriksson would admit, none of the puzzles had really required any advanced skills. And, translated, they led to another cipher. ![]() ![]() But there were also strange symbols comprising several lines and dots - Mayan numbers, Eriksson realised. ![]() Here, encrypted lines from a book were being posted every few hours. Success: another hidden message, this time a link to another message board on the massively popular news forum Reddit. Taking the duck's mockery as a literal clue, Eriksson decided to run it through a decryption program called OutGuess. On the night of January 5 2012, after reading the "decoy" message from the duck, Eriksson began to tinker with other variables. Which means, of course, everyone thinks it's the CIA.įor some, it's just a fun game, like a more complicated Sudoku for others, it has become an obsession. Only one thing is certain: as it stands, no one is entirely sure what the challenge - known as Cicada 3301 - is all about or who is behind it.ĭepending on whom you listen to, it's either a mysterious secret society, a statement by a new political think tank, or an arcane recruitment drive by some quasi-military body. It has also featured a poem, a tuneless guitar ditty, a femme fatale called "Wind" who might or might not exist, and a clue on a lamppost in Hawaii. An interest in both cyberpunk literature and the Victorian occult has also come in handy, as has an understanding of Mayan numerology. So far, the hunt has required a knowledge of number theory, philosophy and classical music. He didn't realise it then but he was embarking on one of the internet's most enduring puzzles a hunt that has led thousands of competitors across the web, down telephone lines, out to several physical locations around the globe, and into uncharted areas of the "darknet". "It seemed like the challenge was a bit harder than a Caesar cipher after all. Looks like you can't guess how to get the message out." It was a picture of a duck with the message: "Woops! Just decoys this way. As Claudius was the fourth emperor, it suggested "four" might be important - and lo, within minutes, Eriksson found another web address buried in the image's code. ![]() It replaces characters by a letter a certain number of positions down the alphabet. Joel deduced it might be an embedded Caesar cipher - an encryption technique named after Julius Caesar, who used it in private correspondence. After only a few minutes' work he'd got somewhere: a reference to "Tiberius Claudius Caesar" and a line of meaningless letters. Sleepily - it was late, and he had work in the morning - Eriksson thought he'd try his luck at decoding the message from 3301. Good luck."Ī self-confessed IT security "freak" and a skilled cryptographer, Eriksson's interest was immediately piqued. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. "We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. The message was in stark white type against a black background. One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer analyst from Uppsala in Sweden, was trawling the web looking for distraction when he came across a message on an internet forum.
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