Cicada 3001 has been called the most elaborate and mysterious puzzle of the internet age.
The Washington Post ranked it as one of the top 5 eeriest, unsolved mysteries of the internet.
2.Subsequent Cicada 3301 puzzles appeared on January 5, 2013 and January 5, 2014.
3.The 2012 puzzle was merely a black image with white punch in.
The text read as follows:
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 us.
We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through.
Looks like you cant guess how to get the message out.
Sure enough, running the image through OutGuess revealed yet another URL.
Other clues involved book codes, King Arthur, and the Holy Grail.
8.These clues finally led to a phone number.
Those who dialed the phone number received the following message:
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.
The new URL also included this message:
You have done well to come this far.
Patience is a virtue.
Check back at 17:00 on Monday, 9 January 2012.
13.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.
Thus our month-long journey ends.
However, no one has come forward to announce being hired by Cicada 3301 as a result.
16.Subsequent Cicada puzzles have led to speculation that the group is part of an esoteric cult.
A book calledLiber Primuswas revealed to be the sacred book of Cicadianism.
This doesnt mean to give ourselves over to something else.
Instead it is to become one with our true nature: as a part of the Global Brain.
What is the cicada image and where did it come from?
The interesting thing about the 3301 logo is that the cicada comes off as a collage.
The veins of the right hind wing are different than the left hind wing.
What is steganography?
What are Medieval Welsh manuscripts?
They are simply the written historical records from Wales from between the 5th and 15th centuries.
Who are code-breakers?
Since Cicada 3301 launched, code-breakers have been working tirelessly to untangle this absurdly complicated code.
Is there any evidence of Cicada 3301 being created by a secret society?
Years ago, Chilean authorities accused Cicada 3301 of being a hacker group that was involved in illegal activities.
Others have claimed its a cult or religion.
What is cryptography?
The word cryptography is derived from the Greekkryptos,meaning hidden, andgraphein,meaning to write.
It refers to both the practice of hiding messages within plain sight and the art of decoding those messages.
What is the Runic Alphabet?
What is theLiber Primusbook?
The Mayan numeral system was a mathematical system that represented numbers and calendar dates in Mayan civilization.
It is visually represented as a series of dots and dashes.
What do prime numbers have to do with the Cicada 3301 puzzle?
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.
Has anyone solved the cicada puzzle?
They seem to share a lot of ideology with the cryptoanarchy movement, and old-school hackers.
The only other person known to have solved the puzzle was a teenage computer expdert namedMarcus Wanner.
According to Wanner, the people who answered satisfactorily at this stage were invited for a private meeting.
They were given further technical work which Wanner was unable to complete.
