Inside The Cicada 3301 Cabal

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 elseand my inbox has never been the same since.

For those that dont 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 years 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, its not the journey that matters. The makers of Cicada promise "enlightenment" to those who can make it to the end. But whats more baffling than each riddle, or what "enlightenment" awaits those who solve them all, are the people behind Cicada.

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 14 different countries to find QR codes that have been physically taped to telephone poles. This suggests Cicada is indeed a global network of individualsa cabal no one knows anything about.

And its 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 there are? 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. Theyre 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 Ill 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 whos made them.

Continue reading here:
Inside The Cicada 3301 Cabal