Someone surmised 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 with the following message: Here is a book code. That link led to a subreddit containing Mayan numerals, a mishmash of letters, and two images that were labeled “WELCOME” and “PROBLEMS.” Other clues involved book codes, King Arthur, and the Holy Grail.Īll the messages were signed with PGP signatures, which are basically a completely secure method of ensuring that the message has come from the confirmed sender. Those who dialed the phone number received the following message: These clues eventually led to a phone number. There are three prime numbers associated with the original final.jpg image. Multiply all three of these numbers together and add a. The other two numbers turned out to be the pixel dimensions of the image. 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. Check back at 17:00 on Monday, 9 January 2012. UTC.Īt 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.ĭuring 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 a stenciled 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 one 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.Īfter a month of conducting this insanely complicated worldwide scavenger hunt, the creator(s) of Cicada 3301 left the following message on 4Chan: Hello. We have now found the individuals we sought. Thank you for your dedication and effort. If you were unable to complete the test, or did not recieve an email, do not despair. There will be more opportunities like this one. That message led to speculation that Cicada 3301 was simply an elaborate recruiting scheme by either a mega-corporation or the CIA to find the brightest minds in decoding. However, no one has come forward to announce being hired by Cicada 3301 as a result. It had been exactly 366 days since the 2012 Cicada puzzle began.
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