Cicada 3301( A secret Intelligence or a scam?)

It was a regular day on the 4th of July in the year 2012 when the above image was posted on 4chan which is similar to reddit but much less filtered and intense. I've been on reddit before but although I have never been on 4chan, I have heard pretty intense stories about it. Coming back to the current topic, the image was posted anonymously in the random section and the author went by the pseudonym 3301.

The author as you can see challenged the users to find the message hidden in the image and a lot of people just considered it as someone trolling in their freetime but little did they know it was about to turn into the biggest scavenger hunt the internet had ever seen.

Unlike some people who ignored the image, there were some who within minutes of the image being uploaded found out that the image when opened with a text editor consisted of a string encoded using Caesar Cipher. 

TIBERIVS CLAVDIVS CAESAR says “lxxt>33m2mqkyv2gsq3q=w]O2ntk”

Someone realized that Tiberius had been the fourth Roman Emperor, so they moved each letter four positions back to reveal an URL to yet another image.

At first people assumed that they had hit a dead end  but on further digging using an application known Outguess users were able extract the information embedded in the image.

Here is a book code.  To find the book, and more information, go to http://www.reddit.com/r/a2e7j6ic78h0j/

1:20
2:3
3:5
4:20
5:5
6:53
7:1
8:8
9:2
10:4
11:8
12:4
13:13
14:4
15:8
16:4
17:5
18:14
19:7
20:31
21:12
22:36
23:2
24:3
25:5
26:65
27:5
28:1
29:2
30:18
31:32
32:10
33:3
34:25
35:10
36:7
37:20
38:10
39:32
40:4
41:40
42:11
43:9
44:13
45:6
46:3
47:5
48:43
49:17
50:13
51:4
52:2
53:18
54:4
55:6
56:4
57:24
58:64
59:5
60:37
61:60
62:12
63:6
64:8
65:5
66:18
67:45
68:10
69:2
70:17
71:9
72:20
73:2
74:34
75:13
76:21


Good luck.

3301

The message led to a subreddit which consisted of Mayan numerals and other clues regarding the books the Holy Grail and King Aurthur. The book code which consisted of reference pages, lines, words, paragraphs etc when applied to the above books another resulted in yet another message being decoded.

I hope you guys are following so far and by this point I think its pretty clear that this is bigger than just some internet troll.

Now, lets continue shall we cause' its about to get wild!

The message decoded was actually a phone number (214 390-9608) which played the same message over and over.

The transcript is stated as follows:

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 on the end to find the next step. Good luck. Good-bye.

Now, you might be wondering what prime numbers??

Well let me tell you what those prime numbers were : they were the pixel dimensions of the first image which were 509 x 503 pixels and the third number?

Yup, it was te pseudonym 3301 itself!

509 x 503 x 3301 = 845145127

The website 845145127.com is no longer available but the website displayed the image of a cicada with a countdown at the bottom and also a message:

You have done well to come this far. Patience is a virtue. Check back at 17:00 on Monday, 9 January 2012. UTC.

So, what happened after the countdown?

The page revealed a bunch of coordinates of places which included major cities Seoul, Paris, Sidney and many others!

52.216802, 21.018334
48.85057059876962, 2.406892329454422
48.85030144151387,2.407538741827011
47.664196,  -122.313301
47.637520, -122.346277
47.622993, -122.312576
37.5196666666667, 126.995
33.966808, -117.650488
29.909098706850486 -89.99312818050384
25.684702, -80.441289
21.584069, -158.104211
- -33.90281, 151.18421
36.0665472222222, -94.1726416666667
37.577070, 126.813122

 Guess what?

People actually flew to these places to the exact location of the coordinates to find posters with the cicada symbol and a QR code.

Now, it was pretty clear that whatever this organization was, it was pretty big and had a lot of resources since it managed to pull such a big feat all over the world. The puzzle was no longer an internet riddle, it turned into a major scavenger hunt. Gathering the attention of massive amount of people.

The QR code once scanned led way to a poem which the cryptography experts decoded to a page with .onion extension which needs to be accessed using an untraceable TOR browser ultimately leading to the dark web.

Congratulations!

Please create a new email address with a public, free web-based service. Once you've never used before, and enter it below. We recommend you do this while still using tor, for anonymity.

We will email you a number within the next few days (in the order in which you arrived at this page). Once you've recieved it, come back to this page and append a slash and then the number you recieved to this url. (For example, if you recieved "3894894230934209", then you would go to "[http:// http://sq6wmgv2zcsrix6t.onion/3894894230934209]")

3301

The above message was waiting for the people who arrived the earliest. There isn't any viable proof as to what happened but a few of the emails were leaked. They showed that the users were subjected many other puzzles dealing with major cryptography techniques like RSA, Number Field Sieve algorithm and MIDI which is a musical cryptogram. These may or maynot be viable since no one came forth to verify whether or not these were the actual mails.

After a month, this excrutiatingly difficult scavenger hunt came to an end when the creators of Cicada 3301 left the following message on 4chan:

And this was last message the creators had left. Nobody knows who were the individuals selected since no one voluntarily came out and said that they were one of the ones who made it.

Damn, so we still don't know what actually happened!

Coming to the conspiracies, there is a large group of people who think this was actually a recruitment test for the CIA to find the brightest cryptographers in the world. Others think it is an underground organization with no relation whatsoever to the government!

Till date no one has clue who the people behind the organization are.

The next following years too similar puzzles were posted claiming to be Cicada 3301 but According to Cicada 3301’s official PGP key, all subsequent alleged puzzles were hoaxes that were not endorsed by the organization. 

Phew that was a whole journey haha! But i hope y'all enjoyed. I really enjoy such topics and i hope you guys do too! Let me know your thoughts in the comments and if you'd like a part 2 of this topic!!

For now its a goodbye!

This video helped alot in the research process.