Since 2012 some of the most arguably intelligent minds have been baffled by a complex cryptographic puzzle designed to recruit the best of the best code-breakers.
Cicada 3301 has often been referred to as “the most elaborate and mysterious puzzle of the internet age” and has been listed as one of the “top 5 eeriest, unsolved mysteries of the internet” by The Washington Post.
The story of this puzzle began with these lines
In 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".
To understand how hard Cicada is, one only needs to look at the complexity of each clue that leads to successive parts of the puzzle–all which need to be completed in order to solve the Cicada mystery.
From the first image that was posted, Eriksson used steganography software to extract a message encoded with a shift cipher, where each letter of the text actually corresponds to another letter. Once he decoded the cypher, it revealed a URL where another image of a duck was posted. Here, he used steganography tools to reveal a hidden book code of a list of two numbers separated by a colon. The book code led to a Reddit URL with Mayan numerals on the top of the page. Eriksson noticed that several posts by a user using a pseudonym seemed to consist of encoded text. This text was the “book” the book code could be used to decode. But to find the cypher he needed to find the key first, which he gleaned from translating the Mayan numerals.
Cicada’s identity is one of the most hotly debated topics among people who try to solve the group’s now annual puzzles. Theories range from global banks that might be trying to set up new digital currencies to political think tanks to nefarious groups of hackers with anarchy on their minds. The most popular assumption, however, is a government intelligence agency like the CIA, NSA, and MI6 that may be trying to recruit talented cryptoanalysts like Eriksson–something Eriksson doesn’t think is likely.
“Make sure that you have a good understanding of every part of the previous Cicada 3301 puzzles. If there is a subject you are not already well acquainted with, take your time to read and learn more about it. Try to solve as much as possible of the earlier puzzles by yourself rather than just reading through a write-up. For parts you do read, make sure you understand each step completely and try to think about how you would have arrived at the same conclusions by yourself.”
“Last but not least, enjoy the ride.”