Did you know about this? There’s been an annual puzzle called Cicada 3301 which is online and bloody hard to solve but one man did it – only to find that he was too late.
“Hello. We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in the image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few who will make it all the way through. Good luck.”
3301 (4 January 2012)
Fast Company has an absorbing account of this mysterious puzzle – there are lots of explanations for why it’s being set but nobody actually knows, or at least nobody who isn’t behind it – and reports:
Joel Eriksson is one of the few known people to have actually solved it since the first challenge appeared online.
“I stumbled upon it on one of the image boards the first image was posted to in 2012,” says Eriksson, a 34-year-old cryptosecurity researcher and developer from Sweden. “Unfortunately, I didn’t see it until some time after it was originally posted, and thus had some catching up to do,” Eriksson says. “Initially, I just thought it would be a nice little brainteaser. I’ve always been interested in anything that can challenge me, and I never give up. In the case of Cicada, the puzzle in question turned out to be a lot more than I thought it would be when I started it.”
Tackling the puzzle would lead Eriksson to rely on a host of skills from steganography to cryptography, to an understanding of ancient Mayan numerology and a familiarity with cyberpunk speculative fiction. As he worked his way from solving one piece of the puzzle to the next, the journey would lead him to discover that the answers lay not just in the digital domain, but in the real world: From clues left on the voicemail of a Texas telephone number to flyers taped to telephone poles in 14 cities around the world. The quest would ultimately return to the deepest layers of the digital world: the dark web.
I have a puzzle of my own: why has this article popped back up into life when it was written eight months ago? I’ve no idea but I’ve checked into it and the Cicada 3301 stuff is still as unknown and mysterious as it was. Read the full piece.