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Chasing the Cicada: Exploring the Darkest Corridors of the Internet | Mental Floss
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By Jed Lipinski When an unsuspecting researcher followed a mysterious command on a 4chan board, he found himself drawn into a scavenger hunt that led him down the darkest corridors of the internet and stretched across the globe. But in a place where no one shows his face and no one plays by the rules, how do you tell where the game ends and reality begins? It was 10 p.m. on a Friday night in January, and Jeff Kinkle was procrastinating. The 32-year-old cultural studies PhD was alone in his Brooklyn studio, working on a paper about institutional secrecy and the national security apparatus. His workspace offered an unobstructed view of the glittering Manhattan skyline, but the young academic, who makes his living as a writer and translator, wasnt feeling inspired. His desk shook every time the trains rattled across the Williamsburg Bridge. The bars downstairs hummed with nightlife. Distracted, Kinkle was scanning /b/, the infamous image-sharing board on the website 4chan. There, a curious message snagged his attention.
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Kinkle had read that the National Security Agency, a U.S. government organization that engages in defensive and offensive cyber operations, was actively using 4chan to scout for hackers. Amid the thread of obscene comments that pass for conversation on /b/, some commenters were suggesting that the strange message might be an NSA recruiting exercise. His curiosity piqued, Kinkle followed the conversation as it moved to a math and science message board. The cyberspace that most of us know and use daily is a place for connecting with friends, paying bills, and sharing funny cat pictures. But Kinkle, like others who delve into the Internet and the cultures that take shape there, knows that the Web is an iceberg: the part that shows being the smallest, least menacing piece. What lies beneath is vaster, darker, and harder to understanda shadowy world where data and hackers and criminals hide. Some call it the deep Web, and Kinkle was about to tumble down a virtual rabbit hole straight into it. Kinkle stared at the message, trying to suss out its meaning. When one commenter suggested opening the image in the simple-text editor WordPad, he couldnt help himself. At the bottom of the text, he found the following message: TIBERIVS CLAVDIVS CAESAR says lxxt>33m2mqkyv2gsq3q=w]O2ntk. And that was a code he thought he could crack.
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Chasing the Cicada: Exploring the Darkest Corridors of the Internet | Mental Floss
anonymity. On /b/, offensive remarks are encouraged, both to repel outsiders and to maintain the boards underground appeal. Longtime users, for instance, are referred to as oldfags; newcomers as newfags; and British people in general as Britfags. The board's Fight Club- style rules emphasize the insular yet anonymous culture they seek to preserve: "1. You do not talk about /b/. 2. You DO NOT talk about /b/. 3. We are Anonymous. 34. If it exists, there is porn about it. No exceptions." The sites anything-goes mentality often leads users to overstep the bounds of propriety and sometimes legality. In September 2008, a college student named David Kernell, the son of a Democratic state representative from Tennessee, obtained access to Sarah Palins personal Yahoo! account. He posted the password on the /b/ board, along with a number of screenshots of the then-governors email messages, which quickly went viral. (The FBI managed to track down Kernells IP address and IP cache records from a proxy site, and he was convicted on charges soon after.) But 4chan also fosters a strange and uninhibited kind of creativity. While the posts are fleeting, users tend to re-post the images they find the most affectingwhether theyre funny, political, or unsettling. And that can spiral into zeitgeisty memes and all sorts of Internet phenomena. LOLcats, the ubiquitous meme featuring pictures of cats with kitten-speak captions, such as U Seez What Iz Put Up With, originated on 4chan. So did Rickrolling, a bait-and-switch meme in which a user clicks a hyperlink only to be redirected to a YouTube video of pop star Rick Astley singing his 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up. (The video has received more than 65 million hits to date.) More significantly, 4chan helped spawn Anonymous, the amorphous global network of hacktivists, trolls, and Web savants that has waged attacks on major corporate and government websites since sometime around 2004, pursuing an unusual breed of cyber vigilantism. Still, as Kinkle well knew, so much of the material in the 4chan stream is either inane or meant as a prank that he questioned how to handle the message. As he monitored the 40 or so commenters discussing the image, he realized that many of them were taking it seriously. He decided to play along. The idea that this was a recruitment exercise was definitely seductive, he recalled. I mean, I dont have any esoteric knowledge the NSA would actually want. But the thought of engaging with people who are on the cutting edge of this stuffthat was exciting.
The phrasing struck Kinkle and the other commenters as odd. Before long, someone realized that the words guess and out might have something to do with the decryption software OutGuess. Running the image through OutGuess, it turned out, extracted a link to a subreddit one of the many boards within the social news website reddit. When Kinkle clicked the link, suddenly the page bore a new mystery: a row of Mayan numerals, several lines of garbled letters, and two images labeled welcome and problems? It was then that someone posted a link to an anonymous room on the chat website Mibbit.com, where users adopted screen names and the conversation continued without the threat of 4chans disappearing archive. Thats when I started to feel a bit creepy, Kinkle
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recalls. Here he was, at 11 on a Friday night, obsessing over a riddle inside a chat room with dozens of strangers. Before this night, Kinkle had interacted with a total of three people on 4chan, a site he characterized as a flow of smut and jokes and weird stuff that vanishes. He saw the site as a playground for trolls, the kind of people who post deliberately distracting or provocative messages in the hope of starting an argument. But most trolls dont put nearly this amount of energy into what theyre doing, Kinkle says. He decided to walk back to his apartment. When he arrived, his roommates were heading out to a bar and invited him along, but Kinkle mumbled an excuse and retreated to his bedroom instead. There, he got to work unraveling a series of cyber clues involving book codes, King Arthur, and the quest for the Holy Grail. Scribbling madly on index cards, he finally uncovered a message: call us on us tele phone number two one four three. Im getting a phone number! he blurted into the chat room. The more advanced commenters doubted it; the less advanced insulted him. Kinkle believed he was onto something, but no one believed him. Then he received a private messageYoure way ahead of the othersand an invitation to a smaller, private chat room within the same network. Once inside, he dialed the number using Google Voice. A recording welcomed him: 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 of these numbers together and add a .com on the end to find the next step. Good luck. Goodbye. The pixel dimensions of the first image, Kinkle realized, were 509 and 503, both primes. He multiplied the numbers and got a URL. An image of a cicada appeared onscreen, above a countdown set to expire in three days. Opening the cicada in OutGuess unveiled yet another message: You have done well to come this far. Patience is a virtue. Check back at 17:00 on Monday, 9 January 2012. UTC. Kinkle slumped in his chair. It was 2 a.m. He had reached the next level of the gamebut what had begun as an online lark was about to breach the walls of the Web and enter real life.
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Chasing the Cicada: Exploring the Darkest Corridors of the Internet | Mental Floss
the same incubatoror at least, the same type of thinkingthat inspired the cicada mystery in which Kinkle found himself steeped.
UNSOLVED MYSTERY
After downloading TOR software, Kinkle visited the appointed address, which instructed him
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to create an anonymous Hotmail account. Minutes later, he received what the sender claimed was a personalized message. It contained a riddle Kinkle had to solve on his own. It required all this complicated decryption software, he says. I just couldnt figure it out. He emailed his programmer friends and anyone he thought might provide a lead, but they too came up empty. And so 10 days after his quest began, it was over. I never heard anything again, Kinkle admits. He adds that he was extremely curious to know who was behind the game and why it was created. If I thought it was just a complex puzzle with a clever answer, I dont think Id have been as captivated as I was. Weeks after he abandoned the quest, the mystery was still nagging at him. While idly Googling cicada and 3301 one day, he discovered a Wiki page about the puzzle that revealed a new development. Another mysterious message had appeared on 4chan in February. It read: We have now found the individuals we sought. Thus our month-long journey ends. But the day after that message was posted on 4chan, yet another strange note cropped up on a temporary text-storage site called Pastebin. It seemed to be a letter of congratulations to the winners of the puzzle, acquired and re-posted by a member of Anonymous. DO NOT SHARE THIS INFORMATION! the re-posted letter began. It continued: 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. The letter offered the winners membership in the group, as long as they answered a few questions, including Do you believe that information should be free? Its a frustrating, enigmatic ending to a saga that, throughout, showed signs of careful craftsmanship and ingenious orchestration. It was a hunt that swept a room full of curious minds from an idle board on 4chan down the Internets most anonymous corridors, then spit them out into the real world. But today, Kinkle feels like hes back where he started. He knows no more about cicada 3301 than he did on that January night. Its actually pretty crazy that theres so little about that final message online, he says. A decent amount has been written about the hunt itself, so its odd that theres barely anything about its conclusion. In 10 days, Kinkle traveled across more of the Web than most people will in a lifetime. The journey stoked his curiosity. Today, he spends his days poring over the underbelly of the Internet. He keeps a Tor browser on his phone, and he stays vigilant, occasionally dipping into 4chans boards, holding out hope that somewhere, flowing in this massive river of smut and depravity and cat jokes, he just might catch a glimpse of the answer. This story originally appeared in mental_floss magazine. Now go download our new iPad app! Or get a free issue of mental_floss magazine via mail.
December 17, 2012 - 11:00am
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A c id B urn 5
2 months ago
Frank A ndrew W as z ut
Cicada 3301 was put out by the Illuminati. It was designed to keep the intelligent distracted with a puzzle that has no end as intelligent people are of a curious nature and providing a puzzle with no end is the perfect way to both keep them living in a perception of a tyrants design and their focus away from what is really going on. I have followed this puzzle for the past 3 days with "outside lo...oking in" approach so that instead of being consumed by solving the puzzle I have worked to get inside of the mind of those whom created it. The message in the original clue explicitly said "the few". At the time I felt this was some sort of hint to find a Holy Grail of information or salvation of some sort. It instills a sense of elitism since it seduces their introverted nature. Now it is pretty obvious that this group wants you to believe that it has some sort of forbidden knowledge. That it knows something that even the brightest don't. It also has all of the traits of a secret society. Many have postulated since it was posted on 4chan that it was posted by the hacktivist group called Anonymous. I honestly thought this at first too but have come to realize that I had overlooked certain discrepancies in the theme of the puzzle and the overall behavior of Anonymous. When comparing the two they are polar opposites with the only common denominator being that of intellectuality. The key difference is that one preaches secrecy while the
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inpres s ion
17 days ago
You're right on the mark, it's the same everywhere, though there's far more to it than simple games, but it's still all meant to keep people going in circles. This may seem like a lie, but I've actually managed to "infiltrate" their private "network" just recently, like a month ago, through their fake pxe "game", if you're looking for the evidence, check it out, along with references to "inet", "brave new world", "in the sun", along with many other 'commands' like fax, rec, dec, rez, fez, flex, fire up, etc, which are the typical pxe commands. At the bottom, it's all meant to hide their private network, essentially a way to affect electro-magnectic waves, things kind of take a turn for the unbelievable at this point, at least for those uninitiated in pxe, it allows you to read and write in light rays with your thoughts, at the most basic level, though it can even give you
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Chasing the Cicada: Exploring the Darkest Corridors of the Internet | Mental Floss
"augmented reality", a "hud" to facilitate the input of commands. Really, the best word for it is telepathy, and it's what all these silly games are meant to hide, and, trust me, I know how outlandish all of this sounds, but I've experienced it myself.
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Frank A ndrew W as z ut
> inpression
17 days ago
From what I have learned in my life nothing seems outlandish nor happens by coincidence. Be ready for the 5th of November. These actions they have been taking now in Syria and planning a false flag FEMA Region 3 is proof of their desperation. They will be coming out of the closet even if it means dragging them out. The species of humanity will be a free one and no longer under the jurisdiction of an ancient elitist fraternity.
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Gogo Y ubari
16 days ago
ron
It's all about greed, it's nothing more than a rich man's cicle jerk, they really have no reach beyond trying to screw you over with parlor tricks and bureaucracy. Try not to jump to outlandish conclusions, it really is all right under your nose, I flushed them out without even leaving my own house, if you can believe that. :p
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Frank A ndrew W as z ut
16 days ago
Well isn't that the damn truth. What do you know about the secret societies in China?
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14 days ago
B ob
17 days ago
dont you find it funny one of the biggest video games of the year comes out on november 5th?
12 days ago
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