Cicada 3301 outguess free#

Armies of users of 4chan, the anarchic internet forum where the first Cicada message is thought to have appeared, pooled their collective intelligence - and endless free time - to crack the puzzles. But as word spread across the web, thousands of amateur codebreakers joined the hunt for clues. Later, the puzzle would lead him to the cyberpunk writer William Gibson - specifically his 1992 poem 'Agrippa' (a book of the dead), infamous for the fact that it was only published on a 3.5in floppy disk, and was programmed to erase itself after being read once. The book, for example, turned out to be The Lady of the Fountain, a poem about King Arthur taken from The Mabinogion, a collection of pre-Christian medieval Welsh manuscripts. 'It was all starting to fit together.' The references became more arcane too. 'I knew cicadas only emerge every prime number of years - 13, or 17 - to avoid synchronising with the life cycles of their predators,' says Eriksson. Pictures of the cicada insect - reminiscent of the moth imagery in Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs - became a common motif. And the puzzles themselves mutated in several different directions: hexadecimal characters, reverse-engineering, prime numbers. Suddenly, the encryption techniques jumped up a gear. 'And things started getting interesting.' 'But then it all changed,' says Eriksson. Up until now, Eriksson would admit, none of the puzzles had really required any advanced skills, or suggested anything other than a single anonymous riddle-poser having some fun. And duly translated, they led to another cipher. But there were also strange symbols comprising of 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 linking to another messageboard 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. 'And I have always had a hard time resisting a challenge.' 'It is, ultimately, a battle of the brains,' he says. Almost two years on, Eriksson is still trying to work out what it means for him. 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. Depending on who 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.

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. It has also featured a poem, a tuneless guitar ditty, a femme fatale called 'Wind' who may, or may not, exist in real life, and a clue on a lamp post 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. I was hooked.'Įriksson didn't realise it then, but he was embarking on one of the internet's most enduring puzzles a scavenger hunt that has led thousands of competitors across the web, down telephone lines, out to several physical locations around the globe, and into unchartered areas of the 'darknet'. 'But it seemed like the challenge was a bit harder than a Caesar cipher after all. 'If something is too easy or too routine, I quickly lose interest,' says Eriksson.

Cicada 3301 outguess how to#

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 decoding the message from '3301'. In 2002 it was suggested that al-Qaeda operatives had planned the September 11 attacks via the auction site eBay, by encrypting messages inside digital photographs. It's a technique more commonly associated with nefarious ends, such as concealing child pornography.