Cicada 3301

[elfismiles]

“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.

3301"

The internet mystery that has the world baffled
For the past two years, a mysterious online organisation has been setting the world's finest code-breakers a series of seemingly unsolveable problems. But to what end? Welcome to the world of Cicada 3301
By Chris Bell / 11:00AM GMT 25 Nov 2013

One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer analyst from Uppsala in Sweden, was trawling the web, looking for distraction, when he came across a message on an internet forum. The message was in stark white type, against a black background.

“Hello,” it said. “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.”

The message was signed: "3301”.

A self-confessed IT security "freak” and a skilled cryptographer, Eriksson’s interest was immediately piqued. This was – he knew – an example of digital steganography: the concealment of secret information within a digital file. Most often seen in conjunction with image files, a recipient who can work out the code – for example, to alter the colour of every 100th pixel – can retrieve an entirely different image from the randomised background "noise”.

It’s a technique more commonly associated with nefarious ends, such as concealing child pornography. 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.

Sleepily – it was late, and he had work in the morning – Eriksson thought he’d try his luck decoding the message from "3301”. After only a few minutes work he’d got somewhere: a reference to "Tiberius Claudius Caesar” and a line of meaningless letters. Joel deduced it might be an embedded "Caesar cipher” – an encryption technique named after Julius Caesar, who used it in private correspondence. It replaces characters by a letter a certain number of positions down the alphabet. 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.

Feeling satisfied, he clicked the link.

It was a picture of a duck with the message: "Woops! Just decoys this way. Looks like you can’t guess how to get the message out.”

"If something is too easy or too routine, I quickly lose interest,” says Eriksson. "But it seemed like the challenge was a bit harder than a Caesar cipher after all. I was hooked.”

Eriksson 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”. So far, the hunt has required a knowledge of number theory, philosophy and classical music. An interest in both cyberpunk literature and the Victorian occult has also come in handy as has an understanding of Mayan numerology.

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. 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. 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. Which means, of course, everyone thinks it’s the CIA.

For some, it’s just a fun game, like a more complicated Sudoku; for others, it has become an obsession. Almost two years on, Eriksson is still trying to work out what it means for him. "It is, ultimately, a battle of the brains,” he says. "And I have always had a hard time resisting a challenge.”

On the night of January 5 2012, after reading the "decoy” message from the duck, Eriksson began to tinker with other variables.


Taking the duck’s mockery as a literal clue, Eriksson decided to run it through a decryption program called OutGuess. Success: another hidden message, this time linking to another messageboard on the massively popular news forum Reddit. Here, encrypted lines from a book were being posted every few hours. But there were also strange symbols comprising of several lines and dots – Mayan numbers, Eriksson realised. And duly translated, they led to another cipher.

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. "But then it all changed,” says Eriksson. "And things started getting interesting.”

Suddenly, the encryption techniques jumped up a gear. And the puzzles themselves mutated in several different directions: hexadecimal characters, reverse-engineering, prime numbers. Pictures of the cicada insect – reminiscent of the moth imagery in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs – became a common motif.

"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. "It was all starting to fit together.” The references became more arcane too. 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.

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. But as word spread across the web, thousands of amateur codebreakers joined the hunt for clues. 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.

Within hours they’d decoded "The Lady of the Fountain”. The new message, however, was another surprise: "Call us,” it read, "at telephone number 214-390-9608”. By this point, only a few days after the original image was posted, Eriksson had taken time off work to join the pursuit full time.

"This was definitely an unexpected turn,” he recalls. "And the first hint that this might not just be the work of a random internet troll.” Although now disconnected, the phone line was based in Texas, and led to an answering machine. There, a robotic voice told them to find the prime numbers in the original image. By multiplying them together, the solvers found a new prime and a new website: 845145127.com. A countdown clock and a huge picture of a cicada confirmed they were on the right path.

"It was thrilling, breathtaking by now,” says Eriksson. "This shared feeling of discovery was immense. But the plot was about to thicken even more.” Once the countdown reached zero, at 5pm GMT on January 9, it showed 14 GPS coordinates around the world: locations in Warsaw, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Arizona, California, New Orleans, Miami, Hawaii and Sydney. Sat in Sweden, Eriksson waited as, around the globe, amateur solvers left their apartments to investigate. And, one by one reported what they’d found: a poster, attached to a lamp post, bearing the cicada image and a QR code (the black-and-white bar code often seen on adverts these days and designed to take you to a website via your smartphone).

"It was exhilarating,” said Eriksson. "I was suddenly aware of how much effort they must have been putting into creating this kind of challenge.” For the growing Cicada community, it was explosive – proof this wasn’t merely some clever neckbeard in a basement winding people up, but actually a global organisation of talented people. But who?

Speculation had been rife since the image first appeared. Some thought Cicada might merely be a PR stunt; a particularly labyrinthine Alternate Reality Game (ARG) built by a corporation to ultimately – and disappointingly – promote a new movie or car.

Microsoft, for example, had enjoyed huge success with their critically acclaimed "I Love Bees” ARG campaign. Designed to promote the Xbox game Halo 2 in 2004, it used random payphones worldwide to broadcast a War of the Worlds-style radio drama that players would have to solve.


But there were complicating factors to Cicada. For one, the organisers were actively working against the participants. One "solver”, a female known only as Wind from Michigan, contributed to the quest on several messageboards before the community spotted she was deliberately disseminating false clues. Other interference was more pointed. One long, cautionary diatribe, left anonymously on the website Pastebin, claimed to be from an ex-Cicada member – a non-English military officer recruited to the organisation "by a superior”. Cicada, he said, "was a Left-Hand Path religion disguised as a progressive scientific organisation” – comprising of "military officers, diplomats, and academics who were dissatisfied with the direction of the world”. Their plan, the writer claimed, was to transform humanity into the Nietzschen Übermensch.

"This is a dangerous organisation,” he concluded, "their ways are nefarious.” With no other clues, it was also asssumed by many to be a recruitment drive by the CIA, MI6 or America’s National Security Agency (NSA), as part of a search for highly talented cryptologists. It wouldn’t have been the first time such tactics had been used.

Back in 2010, for example, Air Force Cyber Command – the United States’ hacking defence force, based at Fort Meade in Maryland – secretly embedded a complex hexadecimal code in their new logo. Cybercom head Lt Gen Keith Alexander then challenged the world’s amateur analysts to crack it (it took them three hours). And in September this year, GCHQ launched the "Can You Find It?” initiative – a series of cryptic codes designed to root out the best British cryptographers. As GCHQ’s head of resourcing Jane Jones said at the time, "It’s a puzzle but it’s also a serious test – the jobs on offer here are vital to protecting national security.”

GCHQ's 'Can You Find It?' puzzle

Dr Jim Gillogly, former president of the American Cryptogram Association, has been cracking similar codes for years and says it’s a tried and tested recruitment tactic.

"During the Second World War, the top-secret Government Code and Cypher School used crossword puzzles printed in The Daily Telegraph to identify good candidates for Bletchley Park,” he says. "But I’m not sure the CIA or NSA is behind Cicada. Both are careful with security, the recent Snowden case notwithstanding. And starting the puzzle on [the anarchic internet forum] 4chan might attract people with less respect for authority than they would want working inside.”

But that doesn’t rule out other organisations. "Computer and data security is more important than ever today,” says Dr Gillogly. The proliferation of wireless devices, mobile telephones, e-commerce websites like Amazon and chip-and-pin machines, means the demand for cryptologists has never been higher. (Something the UK government acknowledged last year when it announced it was setting up 11 academic "centres of excellence” in cyber security research.)

"One of the more important components of security systems is the efficacy of the cryptography being used,” says Dr Gillogly. "Which means cryptanalysts are in higher demand than ever before - no longer just with the intelligence services. It could just as easily be a bank or software company [behind Cicada].”

Eriksson himself agrees. As a regular speaker at Black Hat Briefings – the secretive computer security conferences where government agencies and corporations get advice from hackers – he knows certain organisations occasionally go "fishing” for new recruits like this. But to him the signs point to a recruitment drive by a hacker group like Anonymous.

"I can’t help but notice,” he says, "that the locations in question are all places with some of the most talented hackers and IT security researchers in the world.” Either way, their identity would prove irrelevant. When the QR codes left on the lamp posts were decoded, a hidden message pointed the solvers towards a TOR address. TOR, short for The Onion Router, is an obscure routing network that allows anonymous access to the "darknet” – the vast, murky portion of the internet that cannot be indexed by standard search engines. Estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the "surface" web, it’s in these recesses where you’ll find human-trafficking rings, black market drug markets and terrorist networks. And it’s here where the Cicada path ended.

After a designated number of solvers visited the address, the website shut down with a terse message: "We want the best, not the followers." The chosen few received personal emails – detailing what, none have said, although one solver heard they were now being asked to solve puzzles in private. Eriksson, however, was not among them. "It was my biggest anticlimax – when I was too late to register my email at the TOR hidden service," he says. "If my sleep-wake cycle had been different, I believe I would have been among the first." Regardless, a few weeks later, a new message from Cicada was posted on Reddit. It read: "Hello. We have now found the individuals we sought. Thus our month-long journey ends. For now." All too abruptly for thousands of intrigued solvers, it had gone quiet.

Except no. On January 4 this year, something new. A fresh image, with a new message in the same white text: "Hello again. Our search for intelligent individuals now continues." Analysis of the image would reveal another poem – this time from the book Liber Al Vel Legis, a religious doctrine by the English occultist and magician Aleister Crowley. From there, the solvers downloaded a 130Mb file containing thousands of prime numbers. And also an MP3 file: a song called The Instar Emergence by the artist 3301, which begins with the sound of – guess what – cicadas.

Analysis of that has since led to a Twitter account pumping out random numbers, which in turn produced a "gematria": an ancient Hebrew code table, but this time based on Anglo-Saxon runes. This pointed the solvers back into the darknet, where they found seven new physical locations, from Dallas to Moscow to Okinawa, and more clues. But that’s where, once again, the trail has gone cold. Another select group of "first solvers" have been accepted into a new "private" puzzle – this time, say reports, a kind of Myers-Briggs multiple-choice personality test.

But still, we are no closer to knowing the source, or fundamental purpose, of Cicada 3301. "That’s the beauty of it though," says Eriksson. "It is impossible to know for sure until you have solved it all." That is why for him, and thousands of other hooked enthusiasts, January 4 2014 is so important: that’s when the next set of riddles is due to begin again. "Maybe all will be revealed then," he grins. "But somehow, I doubt it."


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/i ... ffled.html

[Hammer of Los]

...

One long, cautionary diatribe, left anonymously on the website Pastebin, claimed to be from an ex-Cicada member – a non-English military officer recruited to the organisation "by a superior”. Cicada, he said, "was a Left-Hand Path religion disguised as a progressive scientific organisation” – comprising of "military officers, diplomats, and academics who were dissatisfied with the direction of the world”. Their plan, the writer claimed, was to transform humanity into the Nietzschen Übermensch.

On January 4 this year, something new. A fresh image, with a new message in the same white text: "Hello again. Our search for intelligent individuals now continues." Analysis of the image would reveal another poem – this time from the book Liber Al Vel Legis, a religious doctrine by the English occultist and magician Aleister Crowley.

And all this in the Daily Telegraph, too.

Well I never.

Thanks elfy.

...

[Nordic]

Really fascinating.

[elfismiles]

It sounds like another recruitment campaign by Joseph Matheny.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Matheny

http://jmatheny.wordpress.com

http://projectcamelotportal.com/1572-in ... oe-matheny
http://projectcamelotportal.com/intervi ... live-event

[Wombaticus Rex]

You'd think Adobe could have an easier time hiring people in 2013.

[elfismiles]

You'd think Adobe could have an easier time hiring people in 2013.

Yeah, really, seems like this sort of recruitment could be done by anyone nowadays.

[RocketMan]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/i ... -back.html

Wanted: willing puzzle fans to help solve the internet’s most complicated and enduring mystery. Only those conversant in hexidecimal cryptology, medieval Welsh poetry and classical music theory – among many others – need apply.

After a 12 month hiatus, Cicada 3301 – a complex collection of anonymously-set puzzles, without apparent purpose, that have nevertheless held thousands of amateur web sleuths rapt – has made a reappearance.

When the Telegraph first reported on the underground phenomenon last November, global interest intensified in the shadowy organisation – and the elaborate series of cryptographic puzzles apparently aimed at recruiting expert programmers.

And the Cicada’s re-emergence is exactly on schedule, too. The first set of puzzles, identified by images of the insect, appeared on January 5th 2012.

A message left anonymously on notorious website 4Chan simply read: “We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test…”

After a series of increasingly complex riddles – ranging from cyberpunk literature to voicemail messages to posters affixed to streetlights around the globe – the mysterious organisation behind the tests went quiet. Only for another set of teasers to appear exactly one year later, on January 4th 2013.

Again, solvers were faced with another formidably eclectic range of subjects – from ancient Hebrew code tables to Anglo-Saxon runes to Victoria occultist Aleister Crowley. Within a few weeks the puzzles stopped, with only a select few allowed through to a hallowed “inner sanctum” of Cicada.

And, of course, no-one was left any the wiser as to the source or ultimate purpose of the puzzles. Were they part of an elaborate PR campaign for a new Alternate Reality Game? A recruitment drive by the CIA, NSA or MI6? Or just a bit of fun?

But while another set of posers was anticipated during the first week of 2014, this year was different. Such widespread coverage had led some commentators to wonder if, like the insect itself, the organisation might be scared back underground.

Worse, some feared it might lead to widespread “trolling” – hoaxers trying to pass off their own puzzles as legitimate Cicada tests, further muddying the water.

Indeed, the first week of January has seen dozens of messages appearing on messageboards purporting to be from Cicada – some of which were elaborate enough to be believable. And yet all of which have been proved fake.

Until, that is, just before 11pm on January 5th. A Twitter account previously used by the Cicada organisation released a message, bearing the faint image of a cicada, to its 700 followers.

"Hello," it read. "Epiphany is upon you. Your pilgrimage has begun. Enlightenment awaits. Good luck. 3301."

Enthusiasts have since confirmed the message has the necessary PGP signature – a common encryption method used for privacy – to prove it is legitimately from Cicada 3301.

And so the hunt is underway once more. Already, a debate has begun online into the relevance of “Epiphany”, as January 6 is the Christian feast day known as Epiphany.

But by examining the image for steganography – a technique used to hide data inside images, sometimes used by paedophiles or terrorist organisations – solvers have already revealed a quote: "The work of a private man/ who wished to transcend,/ He trusted himself, / to produce from within."

Further analysis with a program called Outguess has revealed a link to Self-Reliance, a treatise on transcendentalism by American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson.

When run through a cipher, the excerpt reveals the phrase “For Every Thing That Lives Is Holy” and a new image – a collage of artworks from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by the English poet and painter William Blake.

Specifically, it features a collage of his works Nebuchadnezzer, The Ancient Of Days and Newton – with a faint marking of a cicada tucked into the bottom of the picture.

But the images are arranged in such a way that some solvers are now debating whether the image is supposed to represent a Thelema star (a hexagram developed by Aleister Crowley) or an image of a Masonic Square.

Either way, the pursuit of a solution continues. Enthusiasts wishing to join in the debate can access an internet chat relay – while a Wiki is constantly updating and sharing progress, with helpful explanations.

And after three years, who knows – perhaps, in terms of determining the purpose and source of Cicada 3301, we may be finally getting closer to what that initial image promises: “enlightenment”.

[elfismiles]

Inside The Cicada 3301 Cabal
November 25, 2014 | 2:00 PM

A teenager says he solved the Internet's most enigmatic mystery, and was granted access to the online headquarters. Here's what he found.
By Michael Grothaus

Michael Grothaus is a novelist, journalist, and former screenwriter represented worldwide by The Hanbury Literary Agency. His debut novel EPIPHANY JONES will be published by Orenda in 2016.

This story contains interviews with Tekknolagi, the student who solved the Cicada 3301 puzzle.

In January I wrote a story about the one person who is known to have made it further down the Cicada 3301 rabbit hole than anyone else—and my inbox has never been the same since.
Cicada's welcome message.

For those that don’t know, Cicada 3301 is a mysterious Internet puzzle that appears online every January. It consists of a highly complex series of riddles and enigmas that stretch from the digital world out into the real world. To solve these riddles you need to have expert skills in a varying range of disciplines including steganography, cryptography, and ancient Mayan numerology, as well as detailed understandings of 18th century European literature and even cyberpunk speculative fiction. And that was just for last year’s puzzle.

Thousands of cybersleuths try to solve Cicada each January (there have been three annual puzzles since 2012) but none are known to have solved it completely. And in this case, it’s not the journey that matters. The makers of Cicada promise "enlightenment" to those who can make it to the end. But what’s more baffling than each riddle, or what "enlightenment" awaits those who solve them all, are the people behind Cicada.
The Cicada Cabal

No one knows if Cicada is a single person or a group of individuals, though evidence from the puzzle points to Cicada being more than one brilliant individual. The sheer scale of the riddles transcends cyberspace and requires participants to call dummy phone numbers set up in the real world and travel to up to fourteen different countries to find QR codes that have been physically taped to telephone poles. This suggests Cicada is indeed a global network of individuals—a cabal no one knows anything about.

And it’s this "unknown cabal" hypothesis that gets peoples minds racing as much as the Cicada 3301 puzzle itself. If Cicada is a group, how many members are there? Where they are based? What are their ultimate motives?

Which brings me back to my inbox...

Since writing my original story about Joel Eriksson, a cryptosecurity researcher from Sweden who was, until now, the only known person to make it further than any other in solving the Cicada 3301 puzzle, I get a few emails each week from people alleging they have information on who Cicada are.

Some emails are obviously fake. They’re from fantasists that want to pretend they hold the hidden knowledge everyone desires. Some emails are downright strange, like the email I received a few weeks ago from a person who said he worked "for a component of the Intelligence Community of a 5-eyes country" and that this intelligence agency had reason to believe Cicada "may be the same group that was behind the 2007 cyberattacks in the Baltics." Then there are the emails that say Cicada are aliens, terrorists, Barack Obama.

But every once in a while I’ll get an email that has the air of believability about it. These emails give me enough of a kick to look into not only the claims they make, but to investigate the person who’s made them.

I received just such an email last week from a person alleging they made it past the point Joel Eriksson did and were actually invited into Cicada’s online layer on the dark net. I began exchanging emails with this person who was more than willing to give me his personal details provided I don’t reveal his true name or contact information. After several follow-up emails and then speaking to him on Skype to get his story, I was able to verify credible details about his life: who he was, where he went to school, that he had the skills needed to solve Cicada 3301.

It is for this reason that I bring you his story now with the caveat that while I believe he is who he claims, and I believe he certainly has the skills to solve Cicada, I have no way of verifying if what he says about Cicada’s inner sanctum is true—though I will say his story is certainly plausible.
The Group Effect

Before exploring the story this person told me it’s important to take a moment to highlight that Cicada says they are looking for talented individuals who have the skills required to join them. The key word there is "individuals." Individuality and individual skill seem to be a highly desired quality for Cicada—and it’s the reason, through no fault of his own, that Joel Eriksson was shut out from entering Cicada’s inner sanctum.

While Eriksson apparently solved all of Cicada’s riddles, the accomplishment was bittersweet. Eriksson only found out about the puzzle’s existence three weeks after other participants had already started their journeys and by the time he solved it, arriving at the ultimate destination—an anonymous website on the TOR network—Cicada had put up a notice announcing that they weren’t permitting people in anymore because they were disappointed that participants had been sharing the solutions to the riddles online. Ironically, Cicada was shutting out the very person they sought: someone who could solve the puzzle on his own, as Eriksson did.
A list of GPS coordinates posted on a screenshot taking the game to a whole new level: the real world.

And with that it seemed like what lay beyond the curtains of that anonymous TOR site would forever remain a mystery. That is, if it wasn’t for a 16-year-old student who, with the help of his friends, made it past before Cicada shut its doors. This student, now 18, would email me two years later telling me he wanted to talk about what it’s like to hang out in Cicada 3301’s inner sanctum and just what the group’s ultimate goals are.
Getting Behind The Curtain

"When I’m competitive, I’m very competitive and this really was interesting," says Tekknolagi when I call him up over Skype and ask what motivated him to try to solve the Cicada 3301 puzzle. In the background I hear him clacking away at his keyboard. "It’s a race against the clock and other people to solve puzzles that involve cryptography and whatnot and that was just really interesting for me, and then also the fact that it was distraction from school work which is kind of nice."

Tekknolagi, of course, is not his real name but a handle he goes by and one that he asked me to call him for this article in order to protect his privacy. At 18 he’s just begun his freshman year as a Computer Science major at a major research university in the Northeast. The university records office confirmed his enrollment to me. His course of study is probably of little surprise to anyone who knows him because he’s been coding since he was 9. But it was at 16 that he first heard of Cicada.
Just one of 14 Cicada-marked QR codes spread across the globe. This one was found in Warsaw, Poland.Photo: via Wikipedia

"I was just in a robotics class in my high school and a buddy of mine came up and said, ‘Hey there’s this weird thing on 4chan’," Tekknolagi says. "I said, ‘Why are you doing on 4chan at school? It’s ridiculous.’ He said, ‘I don’t know, but check it out.’ So I took a look and we both just sat down and messed with it for a couple of hours and eventually found some people and that group of people transformed over time into the group that I finished with."

It’s the formation of the IRC group that Tekknolagi joined to solve the puzzle that is probably the reason that he managed to succeed where Joel Eriksson was stopped. Where Eriksson was working alone, Tekknolagi’s group consisted of about 12 people, most of them Internet strangers, working together to solve parts of the puzzle and share their findings. This success was in direct opposition to the directive from Cicada organizers that they are looking for talented individuals who can solve the puzzle. It’s also the reason Cicada gave for shutting out people like Eriksson who arrived at the site on their own after teams working together had already found it.

But it is this teamwork that enabled the 16-year-old Tekknolagi past the point where Eriksson was shut out. What Tekknolagi found on that site, instead of a message telling him to go away, was a congratulatory letter for getting that far. It also asked him to set up a new email address from a public, free email service and enter it in a field below. The note on the site said Tekknolagi would receive instructions in a few days with how to progress further into the TOR site.
A painting containing a riddle to be solved.

The next day the message was removed from the TOR site, but then discovered in the source code of the former website was binary code which referenced file names of previous clues in the puzzle. It was evident that the test was not over. From the file names of previous clues a new TOR network URL was found that led to a site with another image. The image, a painting, referenced the 1793 book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake. Tekknolagi wrote custom code to decipher another hidden TOR URL from the text. From there more puzzles followed, including the ultimate one, which was a MIDI file that needed to be decoded. Doing so resulted in an ASCII armored message which members of Tekknolagi’s group were instructed to send to a Gmail address. A few days later Tekknolagi received an email saying there would be no more puzzles. The email contained a final TOR URL and a username and password for him to log in with.

Tekknolagi had made it past the curtain.
The Inner Sanctum

"There were a bunch of people on it. Some were from my group, some were existing members or part of some … I don’t know how they described it, but it felt like the board of this weird organization," says Tekknolagi when I ask him what Cicada’s home on the dark web is like.

Tekknolagi says the site consisted of part message board, part chat room, with a private messaging feature as well. On the message board part of the site were a list of different topics including a welcome section as well as sections listing the goals and current projects of Cicada. In the chat room section of the site Tekknolagi saw about 20 members.

"They wanted to further the use of cryptography in the world so people could have privacy and anonymity and stuff like that," says Tekknolagi when I ask what the "current projects" message board contained. "Those were some big ended goals, very broad obviously. There was some end-to-end encryption thing that I was interested in working on."

Tekknolagi’s reports match an email that has since been leaked that is alleged to be from members of Cicada. In the email the organization states:

You have all wondered who we are and so we shall now tell you we are an international group we have no name we have no symbol we have no membership rosters we do not have a public website and we do not advertise ourselves we are a group of individuals who have proven ourselves much like you have by completing this recruitment contest and we are drawn together by common beliefs a careful reading of the texts used in the contest would have revealed some of these beliefs that tyranny and oppression of any kind must end that censorship is wrong and that privacy is an inalienable right...

You are undoubtedly wondering what it is that we do we are much like a *think tank* in that our primary focus is on researching and developing techniques to aid the ideas we advocate liberty privacy security you have undoubtedly heard of a few of our past projects and if you choose to accept membership we are happy to have you on-board to help with future projects.

But Tekknolagi found that the benign nature of their message did not mesh with some of the things Cicada’s leaders revealed in online chats.
A Network of Infiltrators?

Tekknolagi’s claims of Cicada’s goal being to create altruistic open source software for the benefit of mankind may disappoint—or be unbelievable to—people who think Cicada is a front for a terrorist or anarchist organization or a recruitment tool for the NSA, GCHQ, or another Five Eyes member. But just because their stated aims were benevolent, Tekknolagi says, doesn’t mean he didn’t find the Cicada organizers on the other end of the chat room unnerving.
The boot sequence of a decoded Cicada ISO lead to a series of prime numbers listed sequentially, pausing on "1033" and then stopping completely on "3301".

"They wanted to make it seem like they were this network of people that had ‘infiltrated,’ if that’s the right word, various private and public organizations," Tekknolagi says, going on to liken Cicada to the Freemasons and revealing that a Cicada member in the chat room stated that Cicada members had infiltrated major magazine publisher Conde Nast.

Tekknolagi says that during an online chat with one of Cicada’s leaders he told him that he wanted to write a blog post about his experience in solving the puzzle. The leader was open to Tekknolagi’s idea as long as he agreed to leave some pertinent details out, and in return he made him a better offer.

"I expressed interest in publishing a story, which I did publish, of how the whole challenge went down. One of the leaders, I guess you could call it, he said, ‘Hey wait a bit. We have people at Wired. We can get that published for you.’ But I didn’t really want to wait and I also didn’t really want to publish it in Wired so I just went ahead and published it. They weren’t happy but once I removed some other details they were fine."

I press Tekknolagi on just how far the Cicada leader says their involvement with Wired goes.

"I don’t think generally people at Wired are involved but [Cicada] made it seem like they had someone or multiple people inside Wired."
A page of runes from Carl Jung's book Liber Primus was found to have hidden clues.

As for other organizations Cicada say they’ve infiltrated?

"I think they wanted to have the feel that they had these ‘in’ positions in some government whatever," says Tekknolagi, "but I don’t recall a specific instance of hearing that like I did for Wired."

Infiltrating organizations, of course, are the stuff of spy movies and conspiracy theories. I ask Tekknolagi if he believes what the Cicada leader said or if it’s possible the people who organize Cicada are nothing more than a group of random hackers sitting in their basements who want people to believe they are more omnipresent than they actually are.

"I don’t know who would have the time to set up," Tekknolagi says. "The thing about this puzzle is that each step leads to something else and it’s the kind of thing that because it’s time stamped can’t be changed after the fact. The signature wouldn’t work out, so every step had to be planned out beforehand and worked out perfectly. Otherwise, the whole thing would just fall apart. That’s a lot of hours all at once for a puzzle to work out nearly perfectly. My inclination is to think that it’s not just random people."

When I run through some theories of who Cicada might be (aliens, NSA, terrorists) Tekknolagi says "I have no idea" but says one of the most popular theories—that Cicada is a front for a government security agency recruiting people—is unlikely ("I feel like the NSA has better ways of recruiting.") Tekknolagi says Cicada could consist of some security researchers at major companies or universities, but then there were things he saw on their TOR site which also suggests to him that’s unlikely as well.

"It was too informal," he says. "There were some spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes. Too many of those I think to be, like GHCQ, or something like that."

And as for the theory—as some of the emails I get—that suggest Cicada is a cyberterrorist organization?

"There was really nothing ever said to the tune of disruption or virus creation or whatever," he says. "All of it was like, ‘Oh yeah; we’re going to release some public open source software.’"
Where’s The Enlightenment?

In the end, Tekknolagi still doesn’t know who is behind Cicada or what kind of enlightenment—as its creators promise—there is to be had. And though Tekknolagi says he has no reason to believe Cicada is any type of "evil" organization, he says his experience on the inside "was just weird and creepy."

"Creepy because, we [still] have no idea who they are [and] it was just so well thought out. It was weird. Across the globe, fourteen different QR codes were placed just on lamp posts and mailboxes and whatever and I have no idea how long it took them to place those there but they obviously got there somehow," he says, citing just one example of the way the puzzle breaks from the digital to the real world. "Someone had to do it so they have some kinds of resources at their disposal."

But while many who obsess over the mystery that is Cicada might have stuck around to find out more, Tekknolagi only logged into the anonymous site for a few weeks before leaving.

"I just got bored," he says. "I had a job. I was working at a startup and of course that requires focus. Also the puzzle solving was over and I was what? Sixteen? Short attention span. It’s just the puzzle solving is over so I said, ‘Screw this, I’m out.’"

As for the others in his IRC group, Tekknolagi says none of them who he is still in contact with say they stayed for much longer and after a while the Cicada site on the TOR network became hidden again.

Over Skype I still hear Tekknolagi tapping away at his keyboard, working on some project he’s been working on the whole time while we’ve been speaking, only taking breaks to reply to me or to the instant messages this 18-year-old college freshman gets every few minutes. He tells me he has a headache and a lot of work left to do for the night. But before I let him go, I ask him one more thing: "After your experience of getting farther than anyone else has known to have gotten with Cicada, who would you say Cicada are and, regardless of what they claim, what do you believe their ultimate goal is?"

"I don’t know and I don’t know," Tekknolagi says. "That’s the truth. I think that’s the only thing that I can truthfully say."

http://www.fastcompany.com/3038719/what ... ic-mystery

[elfismiles]

Sigils in Video Games ARG?

These Mysterious Symbols Have Been in 19 Video Games and No One Knows Why
By Patrick Klepek
Senior Reporter, VICE Gaming
August 17, 2016



...


...

Duskers designer Tim Keenan claimed that he doesn't know what's going on—and that when he was approached to take part in the game, he sought assurance from other developers that it wasn't anything he'd live to regret. "Honestly, I'm a little embarrassed to say that I don't know exactly what it's all about," said Keenan, who also told Kotaku something similar. "For me, it's kinda like an ARG-in-an-ARG in a way because how Duskers got involved is sorta cryptic too. Whatever it is, it sure is weird!"

Not much to go on, obviously, and when I talked to people who'd been involved in solving some of these mysteries, they expressed concern that it wasn't actually leading to anything. There's a tiny ray of hope, however: Zack Johnson, a designer behind Kingdom of Loathing was willing to give me a little bit to chew on. "It's definitely leading to something," said Johnson. "I really can't say anything about where it's all going. I know this must be frustrating."
...

http://www.vice.com/read/sigil-arg

Meanwhile ... just watched a PERSON OF INTEREST episode that had the rival AI (Samaritan) using ARG-like tactics to manipulate human agents to commit real acts of espionage but also as a recruitment tool for human agents.

The Nautilus game is a reference to a real life equivalent, Cicada 3301, which first appeared in January, 2012, then again at the same time in the subsequent years. Believed by some to be an alternate reality game (ARG) or a means to recruit highly intelligent people for some unknown reason, the real purpose of the game is unknown, as is its outcome. It has been attributed to a number of sources, including the National Security Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency, while others believe it may have been created by some sort of secret society.[1]

http://personofinterest.wikia.com/wiki/Nautilus

Person of Interest needs an ARG
http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/view ... hp?t=36296