How many of us know that this Mystery is one of its kind from its Very Beginning?
Cicada 3301 first appeared in January 2012, with a picture posted on 4Chan, the weirdo and exciting message gave birth to the INTERNET MYSTERY(CICADA 3301)
Before digging in let’s have quick info about 4Chan- “4chan is an anonymous English-language official imageboard website Launched by Christopher moot Poole in October 2003, the site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from anime and video games, music, literature, fitness, politics, and sports, among others. Registration is not possible, and users generally post anonymously, with threads receiving recent replies being bumped to the top of their respective board and old threads being automatically deleted as new ones are created”
This is the Beginning of CIcada 3301
In a white text on a black background, the posted message read:
Hello. We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test.
There is a message hidden in this image.
Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through.
Good luck
It was signed 3301
CICADA is a Mystery so maybe writing about it can bring the WRITER and the READER into confusion and dilemma. For this let us go with some points.
someone opened the image in the text-only editor WordPad that they realized that there was an embedded “Caesar cipher” near the bottom.
That weirdo message was assumed to be an encryption technique. Someone realized that Tiberius had been the fourth Roman Emperor, so they moved each letter four positions back to reveal an URL
Clicking the URL leads to the photo of a "RUBBER DUCK"
Someone told that the use of the words “out” and “guess” suggested that the duck image should be run through another text editor named OutGuess. Sure enough, running the image through OutGuess revealed yet another URL. That link led to a subreddit containing Mayan numerals, a mishmash of letters, and two images that were labelled “WELCOME” and “PROBLEMS.” Other clues involved book codes, King Arthur, and the Holy Grail. These clues finally led to a phone number. Those who called the phone number received the following message.
Multiplying the pixel dimensions of the first new image on the page yielded yet another URL—one that led to a picture of a cicada on the screen and a countdown that had been set to expire in three days. The new URL also included this message.
At the end of the three-day countdown, the website reloaded to reveal fourteen GPS coordinates across the world in the following locations: Warsaw, Seoul, Paris, Sydney, Hawaii, Miami, New Orleans, and Seattle. During the course of the next week, participants visited the GPS coordinates and in each instance found the same thing: sheets of white paper taped to a streetlight, each one featuring an image of a cicada and a QR code. The QR codes linked to new URLs which featured lines from the William Gibson poem “Agrippa (A Book of the Dead).” Cryptologists were able to extract a new code—this is a new URL with a “.ONION” domain name which must be viewed by the untraceable TOR browser. The Tor link instructed users to open a Hotmail account where they would be sent a new message. The new message was yet another jumble of puzzles and encoded messages.
After a month of conducting this insanely complicated worldwide weirdo hunt, the creator/creators of Cicada 3301 left the following message on 4Chan
CONCLUSION:
CICADA began recruiting for “highly intelligent individuals” online. Candidates had to prove their skills in codebreaking, cryptography and computer programming by solving a complex puzzle dubbed as Cicada. It required knowledge of steganography, contacts on the ground everywhere from Seoul to Sydney, and the ability to obtain a copy of William Gibson’s famous disappearing poem “Agrippa.” What was the purpose of the puzzle? No one knows, but many set out to solve one of the internet’s greatest mysteries. Only a handful of geeks were able to pass the final stage of CICADA 3301 and reached the end.
NOTE: This is just a part of the story. Stick around the BLOG PAGE to READ the next and final story…..
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