In a long investigation for the Telegraph, journalist Chris Bell immersed himself in the fascinating puzzle that has had the world's best cryptographers on their toes for two years: Cicada 3301.
It is a series of coding and general culture tests of a group or a person who has the resources to challenge only the best in the art of hacking, and, presumably, to recruit them. Images with one of every 100 pixels exchanged, which when added together form a url; forays into the deepweb, the dark zone of the internet where organ traffickers and terrorist organizations swarm; in addition to numerous skill games for code professionals that first appeared on an Internet forum under the following message:
Hello. We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them we have devised a test. There is a hidden message in this image. Find it and it will lead you on the path to us. We look forward to meeting the few who will make it to the end of the road. Good luck.
The message was signed "3301".
Many professional analysts and cryptographers were tempted, rather, called. The secret code in the first image led to a url that showed a cute duck with the caption: “Woops! Just a decoy. It seems you couldn't figure out how to get the message out. "
From then on, treasure hunters began to share clues and found themselves immersed in references to poems, deep web sites, Mayan numerology, philosophy, classical music, number theory, hexadecimal characters, reverse engineering, prime numbers, numerous references. to the cicadascicada), disturbingly related to the imaginary of The silence of the inocents, in addition to physical clues left in GPS-traceable coordinates in Warsaw, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Arizona, California, New Orleans, Miami, Hawaii and Sydney, which inevitably led to new clues and new dead ends.
When the searchers reached the mysterious site 845145127.com (which featured a counter that would eventually reach zero, in the shape of a cicada) they knew they were near the end. On January 9, 2012 at 5:00 pm GMT, the counter reached zero. Some believed that it was a very complicated public relations campaign, an augmented reality game or a summons from the CIA, MI6, some intelligence agency in the world, and even a bank looking for security analysts and even Anonymous. However, little is known for sure about Cicada 3301, because when the counter reached zero and the site reached a certain number of visits, the following message appeared:
"We want the best, not the fans."
In the following days, some of the cryptographers received an email with more information - content that none of them released afterwards. It is known, however, that this was more advanced cryptography testing, implying that the virtual marathon they had communally passed through was just one part of the filter in a strange recruitment process.
A few days later, Cicada posted the following message on Reddir:
Hello. We have found the individuals we were looking for. So our long journey of months has come to an end. For now.
Fountain:
pijamasurf.com
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