CICADA 3301

Summary:

Cicada 3301 has been called "the most elaborate and mysterious puzzle of the internet age" and listed as one of the "top 5 eeriest, unsolved mysteries of the internet."

It started out when an anonymous 4chan user posted a black and white image. The post made people on the web started to search for the said hidden message. This was until Joel Eriksson, a computer analyst from Sweden, found the message. He knew it was an example of digital steganography, which is a way of hiding encoded messages within the pixels of an image.

Eriksson decoded the hidden message from the image above using steganography software with a shift cipher. He found a web address which contained another clue to proceed the puzzle trail. Each trail was becoming increasingly difficult to solve.

The next clue was an image of a wooden duck with another cryptic message. Again he used steganography to reveal a hidden book code with a list of two numbers separated by a colon. The book code led to a Reddit URL with Mayan numerals on the page.

Eriksson then noticed that several posts by a user using a pseudonym seemed to consist of encoded text. Analyzing the text, he saw that the book code could be used to decode, but the cypher was inside the key, which he then found by translating the Mayan numerals.

The decoded text revealed two images. After running steganography on them, he found strings of digits that was a phone number (214 - 390 - 9608). 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."

In 2012 various posteres regarding Cicada3301 where found in:
  1. Chino, California
  2. Erskineville, Australia
  3. Fayetteville, Arkansas
  4. Haleiwa, Hawaii
  5. ...
Here is the same content inside an unordered list:
  • Chino, California
  • Erskineville, Australia
  • Fayetteville, Arkansas
  • Haleiwa, Hawaii
  • ...
Country City Year
California Chino 2012
Australia Erskineville 2012
Hawaii Haleiwa 2012

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