Thread by @theadnaankhan

Did you know before the monoliths there was another puzzle gripping the internet?

The Cicada 3301

A 🧵 on one of the greatest mysteries the internet has ever seen. Grab some 🍿. You're in for a ride.

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The Cicada 3031 was a series of puzzles.
Puzzles for the brightest minds, posted by an unknown, mysterious organisation.

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These were not everyday afternoon sudoku-esque puzzles. These were highly cryptic, highly difficult puzzles. Each messages leads to a puzzle, each puzzle more difficult than the last one.

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The first ever message was posted on 5th January 2012 on one of 4Chan's boards. The first image looked something like this:

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A 34 year old crypto security researcher from Sweden Joel Eriksson is supposedly one of the few known people to have solved it completely. He used steganography to crack the message and it led him to an URL with the image of a duck.

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Another steganographic technique revealed a hidden book code with a list of two numbers separated by a colon which led to a Reddit address with Mayan numerals.

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He noticed that many posts published by a user had some kind of encoded text which could be decoded with code from the book. Solving this code led to two different images which also had more hidden messages which led to a phone number in Texas, USA.

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Calling a voicemail read : "Very good. You have done well. There are three prime numbers associated with the original final.jpg image. 3301 is one of them. You will have to find the other two. Multiply all three numbers together and add a .com to find the next step. Goodbye"

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The other prime numbers turned out to be the dimensions of the original image and multiplying it with 3301 led to a URL which revealed a series of numbers which were GPS coordinates of telephone poles in various countries.

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These were in different countries like Spain, Russia, America, France, Japan and Poland. These QR codes led to two other images which had more hidden text and it had William Gibson's poem Agrippa which was only released on 3.5 inch floppies.
Yes floppy disks.

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Using the same code from the previous book led to a whole series of another puzzles some of which had some old add Welsh manuscripts. This further led to a website on the TOR network which was the last stop after this whole riddle frenzy

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But here Cicada 3301 sniffed out a problem. They figured that people were collaborating a little too much to solve the problems. Only the quickest one's to reach the TOR website were rewarded and a statement was out which said "We want only the best, not the followers"

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Cicada was over and done. Most people expected it to be a one time thing but....

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On January 5, 2013 exactly a year and a day after the original posting there was a new message on 4chan again. It read
"Hello again. Our search for intelligent individuals now continues"

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The puzzles were different, but they were kind of similar to the first one's and it more or less followed the same path. And just like the first time only the quickest to reach the final website were rewarded and the URL was closed after.

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People were eagerly waiting to see if another challenge pops up in 2014. And it did.

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The opening message of that year's puzzle read :
"Hello. Epiphany is upon you. Your pilgrimage has begun. Enlightenment awaits."

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Once again the image had a message and the message led to a book and the book led to a link and it was more or less the same.
Except for one thing...

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The message was around a kind of strange book called 'Liber Primus' which meant First book in Latin.

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In 2013 there were some cryptic rune like messages obtained that didn't seem to make a lot of sense then but now they started to make sense because this book Liber Primus was written in runes

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Even the messages when translated were kind of cryptic. It seemed to be their manifesto because it had various philosophical and ideological ideas.
It also had a lot of clues and codes which have still not been cracked.

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Of the 74 pages of runes only around 19 pages have been decrypted and even those pages that have are kind of difficult to interpret.

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2015 came and went by without any challenge and people thought that Liber Primus was the last one. This was confirmed when Cicada dropped this message in 2016.

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But here a question arises what was the point of this? Why did these people do this? and where does Liber Primus lead us to ?

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Many people thought that this was some sort of an internet troll or some sort of a promotional stunt by any company. But because the puzzles kept coming and there was absolutely no kind of commercialization.

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Some people claim to have leaked some kind of an email from the final stages of the puzzle and it makes a bit of sense.

26/n

Cicada described themselves as an international organisation which was solely worried about privacy of the people. The email concluded with three questions....

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Do you believe information should be free?
Do you believe that every human has the right to privacy and anonymity?
Do you believe that censorship harms humanity?

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The organisation has gone silent and nobody has any clue as to what and who exactly these people were and what were they looking for.

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If you want a good detail of all the puzzles you'd want to go to Nox Populi's YouTube channel which has explained them in detail.

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Do RT and share if you did like this and if I should write more of these.
Ooof this is the biggest thread I've ever written. Wow. Enjoyed it a lot though. Hope you enjoy reading it as much.

Do not bookmark and forget this thread hahaha.