Cicada 3301 – The biggest Internet mystery of all times

 12 of January 2012, users that were browsing 4chan the web site, came across a mysterious information:

We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them we have devised a test

There is 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.

A lot of forum users got interested in that. But at the beginning they were thinking of it as: great viral, marketing campaigne or a simple joke. Some of them even wondered if it was a NSA requirement program.

Solution to the first riddle moved the user to the next image with hidden information inside. That information took the user to another codes and mysterious riddles.

Each part of these puzzles was signed by 3301

Professional code-breakers involved into that whole Cicada 3301 thing, after having solved one of the riddle, they got a phone number. When they called  that number they heard a prepared voice message, that took them to the website, where a picture of Cicada and the countdown was published.

After the countdown on website  geographical locations of paces appeared: North America, Europe and Asia. In each of these locations they found posters with the image of cicada, below the image there was QR code.

To people that have broken another code “Cicada” sent individual tasks. But when some of them were leaked, tests were changed, and leakers were disqualified.

One month  later, 3301 announced that the person they had been looking for was found. They thanked everybody for participation and said:

There will be more opportunities like this one

Each year since 2012 they have been making next puzzles, and each of them are posted in January. So it’s pretty obvious that they will made another quiz in 2016, too.

Szymon Gumiela 2a