it is an old maximum of mine that when
you have excluded the impossible
whatever remains however improbable must
be the truth
these are the famous words of sherlock
holmes and the thoughts of a 19th
century detective come to my mind for a
very good reason for i bradley peak
we'll try my hand as a detective of the
21st century and shall try to crack the
case that has been stirring the minds of
internet goers for over 10 years today
ladies and gentlemen i'm going all the
way i'm solving the mystery of cicada
3301
[Music]
our story begins on 4chan.org 10 years
ago it was one of the most popular
entertainment resources in the world and
any visitor could leave a message with a
picture and at the same time they could
remain anonymous there was practically
no censorship on 4chan either so often
posts and discussions contained a huge
amount of pornography
hard trolling and racist jokes but here
vistas planned mass flash mobs and they
created memes and hacker groups
coordinated actions and boasted of
success so a subculture was formed there
that opposed itself to social networks
that kept rapidly losing freedom on
january the 4th of 2011 a strange ad
appeared in the most popular section of
4chan a simple text on a black
background challenging viewers to solve
a puzzle within the image itself this
picture is very different from what
usually appears on 4chan and pretty much
it just issues a challenge right it's
not surprising that the forum's frequent
flyers were enthusiastic about finding
the solution to this puzzle
but only one thing can be said about the
picture itself it was made by a person
with very good taste this person is
familiar with the basics of design and
topography i mean there's a
well-readable and contrasting font there
are neat margins on the left and top the
same indentation between the paragraphs
and double indentation after the
signature the phrases are constructed
correctly without errors and typos and
in general all of this would be more
appropriate on the pages of a corporate
booklet or textbook rather than well
4chan an entertainment resource but i
also noticed unusual gaps look carefully
the spaces between words differ to the
spaces between sentences indeed after a
full stop the author used a double space
a trifle well not at all
all your little puzzles making me dance
actually from such a trifle i can
conclude that the text was written by a
pedantic and middle-aged american
why well take a look at this first
newspaper printing of the transcription
of the declaration of independence of
america
now this was made on july the 6th
1776 and sentences within paragraphs are
separated by
double spaces
now in america this typographic
tradition survive really until the end
of the mid 20th century at typing
courses secretaries and typists were
taught exactly this method of typing
now with the advent of computers another
option came into use the use of just one
space this is something we're all
familiar with today right but
traditionalists and supporters of the
academic style of text design defiantly
continue to use double spaces and even
slight studies occasionally that prove
their correctness
however these observations don't bring
us any close to the solution of 3301 but
only indicate the pedentry and accuracy
of the messages author the most obvious
options for solving this problem
immediately go out the window i mean
neither the name nor the exif data
contain any information whatsoever and
by the way 4chan unlike modern social
networks did not remove this data
when users published posts right so this
shows us that the author himself
manually took care of this interesting
someone's kept in that way
now the aspect ratio of the image also
attracts some attention it's a square or
rather almost a square 509 points in
width and 503 points in height you have
to agree if you were making a similar
picture you probably would have chosen
well rounder values right exactly 500 by
500 for instance
this contrasts with the pedantry that we
noted earlier the only thing that really
unites this number with the signature
3301 is that they are all prime they're
not divided by any multipliers other
than themselves and this is hardly a
coincidence right
3302 510 or 504 these would have changed
the whole picture what does this mean
well nothing yet
yes now the first real hint that we get
is hidden in the file itself someone
guessed to open the image in a regular
text editor and look at the source code
perhaps this person was looking for
traces that graphic editors often leave
at the beginning of files but he found
something completely different
now see for yourself how jpg images look
like through the eyes of a computer a
hodgepodge of symbols by which we will
not be able to determine what is
depicted in the photo the kitten or an
explosion of an atomic bomb
but the file from the post on 4chan
contained a line intended for human eyes
look here at the very end
it turns out that one message hides
another in itself and this technique is
called steganography which combines the
word steganos meaning covered or
concealed and graffia meaning writing
obviously in greek and this is the most
ancient method of secret message
exchange people tried to hide from other
people's eyes not just the meaning of
the letter but the very fact of the
letter's existence for example one of
the ancient greek tyrants conveyed a
message to his ally using a tattoo on
the body of a slave right the poor guy
was shaved bald and then they tattooed a
secret message on the back of his head
now after a couple of months the hair
securely hid that message and the slave
set off on his way but look steganon 3
does not change the text but hides the
very fact of his existence in our case
until you open the image in a text
editor you will not even guess that
there is additional information to it i
mean the characters at the end of the
file don't actually prevent the display
the image itself the browser or graphic
editor simply ignores them now this
method of transmitting information was
also used by the first ever hackers
since it's actually possible to merge a
short node into a photo without the use
of additional programs using simply one
command in the console but we are
clearly facing something far more
complex now the first three words here
evoke an association with ancient rome
it's the formal name for claudius right
but what he says to us is not yet clear
it looks like some kind of code or
cipher however if you've even been
slightly interested in cryptography well
then the answer is obvious one of the
first ever encryption systems was
developed by the roman commander guys
julius caesar really well
the principle of his encryption is
extremely simple write the alphabet
twice on two different sheets of paper
put them
one under the other and then shift the
lower one by several letters and now
write down the letters of the message
from the upper alphabet with the letters
that were under them
now to decipher this message the
recipient must shift his pair of
alphabets in the opposite direction by
the same number of letters
this number is called a step and the
algorithm itself is called a shift
cipher or what you guessed it's caesar
code right in principle the main
drawback of this algorithm is that the
key to it is
only one number and even if you don't
know it exactly guessing it will only
take a few seconds look it's enough to
enter an encrypted message the online
sees the code calculator and then you
just click the step counter counts the
steps right one two three
four and we get a hint
now this obviously looks kind of similar
to an instant address right the letters
http at the beginning the domain name
com the jpeg file extension i mean we
can probably assume that
the greater than sign replaces the colon
the number three is a slash and the two
is a dot right so we're on the right
track but even with my assumptions we
don't actually get a usable link why
well because the romans didn't
distinguish between uppercase and
lowercase letters also they didn't use
separate numerical digits and of course
they didn't use modern punctuation the
calculator correctly replaced the
letters of the alphabet but couldn't
cope with any other stuff right so we
need to expand the alphabet but in what
order should the new numbers and symbols
go if the order doesn't match the one
used by the authors of the encrypted
message then well we won't get the
correct link
in fact programmers faced a similar
problem at the dawn of the appearance of
computers the letters in computers are
stored and processed by their special
names or codes but what code each letter
will have was determined by developers
of programming languages so really until
the early 1960s there were several
different kinds of encoding however in
1963 the american standards association
developed a single encoding table the
ascii
now let's try and supplement our
alphabet with letters numbers and
symbols in the order defined by this
standard now as a result we get a link
to well a new hint by the way even the
shift step would not have to be selected
manually tiberius claudius caesar who
was mentioned in the hint was the fourth
roman emperor
so before preceding the next hint let's
discuss who is the protagonist in this
saga of obfuscation well one of the most
popular theories which appeared almost
immediately and is very popular today is
that it's a head hunting exercise for
the secret service if you're able to
solve the riddles of 3301 before anyone
else then you'll end up in some room at
an interview for men in black supporters
of this version like to record the
crossfit puzzle with the help of which
in 1943 the british special services
found gifted people to work on
decrypting enigma now this is true but
only partially let me tell you indeed on
january the 13th of 1942 a complex
crossword puzzle appeared on the pages
of the daily telegraph according to
urban legend everyone who solved this
crossword puzzle received invitations to
work in the cryptography department of
alan turing in fact the day before
publication this crossroad puzzle was
used in a competition that the newspaper
held jointly with the eccentric club now
participants were invited to solve a
crossword puzzle in just 12 minutes
right the editor-in-chief of the
newspaper and the representative of the
club followed these events
out of about three dozen applicants only
five could cope with the task later they
did actually receive invitations to work
at bletchley park as
ordinary code breakers
by the way the competition was in person
with observers and an unknown task and
besides especially unexpectedly they
didn't recruit analysts mathematicians
or engineers this way but just ordinary
executors whose tasks included only
routine and monotonous paper pushing
right they were not required to have any
mathematical abilities or analytical
skills they just needed patient accurate
and well diligent executors and by the
way during the war the staff of the
government code and cypher school in
bletchley park increased from a couple
of hundred to actually 9 000 people
perhaps some of them could share stories
that are a bit more off the beaten track
here by the way i'd have no chance in
cracking the crossword puzzle in 12
minutes i mean i barely cope with the
metro's crossword on the way to work and
that commute is a good 40 minutes so
they wouldn't have taken me to bletchley
park look at you lot you're all so
vacant is it nice not being me it must
be so relaxing now government code and
cyber school has since changed its name
to government communications
headquarters and it still supports this
legend until now gch holds interesting
logic contests around christmas time but
they do it absolutely openly right on
their website go ahead maybe you'll end
up as a new recruit in the case of the
3301 riddle i strongly doubt that
playing with the simplest steganography
and entry-level cryptographic algorithms
would help to identify really
off-of-the-wall analysts right much of
what we're talking about may be
unfamiliar to the general public but any
programmer knows about the caesar cipher
or the a s c i table from the first book
he reads we're talking abc's here guys
bored what
no
moreover all versions and keys to
solving riddles were discussed right
there on 4chan that is anonymously and
right in the public domain it's like
taking a test in the middle of a noisy
square where everyone is trying to hand
over their answers at once right now the
main body of mathematicians and artists
has traditionally been recruited without
the help of logical problems and puzzles
alan turing and gordon welchman i think
got to gch from cambridge university and
for example hugh alexander cornell was
at that time the world famous british
chess champion but the special services
during the war really had to act more
covertly so as to not betray the very
fact of the existence of cryptographic
departments now the government services
don't have to hide that's why if you
want to work for the crown or uncle sam
you just send your cv to the cia or
mi6's hr department right but
if you've already shown your talent as
developer mathematician or analyst on
the internet they'll probably contact
you anyway if your abilities are needed
but anyway back to our riddle so we have
a link to an image that has been posted
on imager.com this is basically a
website where anyone can upload any
image and in 2012 more than a million
people visited it every day
so is there a new mystery waiting for us
at the end of this link
[Laughter]
whoops
okay well this time we've got something
completely alien to the first picture
there is a gross mistake in the first
word the text is placed carelessly
almost overlapping with a background
picture now it's rectangular with a
width of exactly 500 and a height of 375
these are not prime numbers no secret
messages in the text right so these
things have nothing in common we must
have missed something in the very first
picture and the link was just a
distraction so let's take a look at the
first message again the empty spot in
the lower right hand corner looks
suspicious maybe there is another hint
hidden within it now if you go ahead and
adjust the brightness contrast or
saturation filters you won't get any new
information but you will get strange
noise that's scattered all over the
image
this noise is a slightly different color
from the background it's not black but
it's almost black i've shown in my
previous video actually how you can
expose fake photos with the help of such
anomalies do you remember if you haven't
watched it we'll put a link somewhere
and you can go watch it after this video
but really there should be no noise in
this picture the black background should
have remained black now this image was
edited in a very special way someone
really added another layer of data to
the image this is actually similar to
the work of advanced technographic
programs and these guys didn't just add
plain text to the end of the file they
actually used a complex algorithm to
change the points of the file itself but
now there's a new problem how can you
find the program on which this was done
i mean there are quite a few
steganographic applications right but
they can only open their own files
inspired by the news users started to
sort through these programs one by one
and through trial and error they managed
to actually find out that the author of
the image used a little-known program of
a mathematics student from hamburg this
very program was called out guess and
just you know it turns out that this
name had been in front of our eyes the
whole time the words guess and out are
written here in plain text
so look this program suddenly became
very popular understandably so
information about the strange contest
was already being discussed way beyond
4chan tens of thousands of people tried
to solve the message of 3301 so outguess
broke download records but therefore the
new suspect became nils provos himself
the author of outguess
[Music]
from latin translates to done by the one
who profits from it this is actually a
popular expression from ancient rome and
it accurately describes the logic of
modern investigators always the first
suspect is the one who benefits from the
crime only in the case of nils provost
the outguest story becomes a defense
witness look at the archive of the
programme's page through the wayback
machine this is how she looked in
january of 2012. you see nils provost
released the latest version of the
program in 2004 11 years before the
appearance of the riddle of 3301 and he
never returned to it this is easily
explained in 2003 niels completed his
degree at the university of michigan and
got a job at google as a distinguished
engineer on security for their cloud
platform and i very much doubt that he
had the time to engage in these kinds of
hoaxes right in addition the image of a
german mathematician who's quite young
is very different from the person who
wrote the first message and niels didn't
really receive any financial benefits
from the famous program either it was
distributed for free and was developed
primarily for open bsd and this is an
extremely interesting point moving
forward the fact is that openbsd is a
free operating system that was created
by hackers for hackers and technically
special attention is paid to the
security and stability of the system it
doesn't use questionable programs or
individual modules even small errors
cause a complete revision of the code in
addition the system is protected from
legal disputes it only uses open and
license free code any use of patent
protected challenges completely excluded
here openbsd was created by
professionals and for professionals
therefore it is often used in network
security systems right this system
really isn't designed for office
computers and laptops but it's extremely
effective when we're talking about
complex network equipment on secure
servers and internetwork interfaces now
it seems to me that by choosing outgess
the author of the riddle 3301 hinted as
to which specialists he's looking for if
we're to follow that narrative
i can actually show you which message
was hidden in the very first picture
this message is already much longer than
the previous ones it's actually 83 lines
however we can only read the first one
so far so this is what's written here is
a book code to find the book and more
information go to reddit now in this
line alone i see three important things
at once
first the author of the riddle again
indicates which algorithm one should use
to decrypt this message secondly he or
she indicates where to get the
information necessary for decryption and
again this is an extremely popular site
where users can post their news and
participate in various discussions
thirdly
there is still the same double space
between the sentences you can see that
the format of the message has changed
and the typographic handwriting is still
fully recognizable so we click on the
link and well
it seems we haven't solved the problem
just yet this is how the page looks now
and this is how it looked like almost 10
years ago eight days after the start of
the quest you see after one of reddit's
redesigns the background image
disappeared completely from the page's
header and messages were sorted not by
publication date but actually by
popularities so judging by the hint
we're dealing with a book cipher what is
that technically a more advanced
encryption method than the caesar code
right it's much more reliable and at the
same time it's actually easier to use
the essence of the book cipher is that
we replace the letters of words of the
original message with the numerical
place at which they occur in a key book
for example right if the key book is the
declaration of independence then the
name of our
m s channel
b sum sub can be written as
9 12 28 10 23 32 please note that i
encrypted the same pairs of letters s
and u with different numbers right now
it's almost impossible to decrypt such a
cypher without having the book key of
course an attacker can just look in
their library and try to pick out a
popular key text right but this will
only work if the key text is something
popular for example the bible and it was
by uncovering a key book that one of the
three cryptograms describing the
legendary treasures of the gold digger
bill was hacked at the end of the 19th
century now it was actually by
uncovering one of these key books that
one of the three cryptograms describing
the legendary treasures of the gold
digger beale was hacked at the end of
the 19th century now in this case beale
much like me in this situation used the
text of the declaration of independence
for his encryption
what books he used to encrypt the two
remaining notes is still completely
unknown for decryption enthusiasts have
already gone through more than 8 000
different texts and thus far this search
has not been fruitful therefore 30
million worth of treasure is still
hidden out there somewhere in missouri
now look we'll probably get a similar
result if we try and directly decipher
the message
that we received right these are the
first four titles so let's
cross-reference those numbers with what
we found in the 83 lines in the first
message the 20th letter is u
the third letter and the second one is o
the fifth letter and the third is s and
the twentieth in the fourth is e
oh c okay i think we made a mistake here
but the book in which we're trying to
search for letters is not at all similar
to an ordinary book apparently
it is also encrypted okay there are more
than 80 messages on the page meaningless
sets of characters of different lengths
and pictures have been added to two
messages the first is a doormat with the
inscription welcome and the second is a
stereo picture clearly made with the
help of
easystereogroundbuilder.com the images
again don't look like those that we're
used to before however you probably
already guessed what you need to do with
them that's right check for a hidden
message using outguess so in the first
picture there was this message it seems
that 3301 is afraid that fake hints will
appear on the internet in the wake of
interest in his riddles therefore
it will now sign all the messages with
an electronic digital signature please
note that for this 3301 uses a program
for another open operating system linux
this is the development of a famous
finnish program linus torvalds now
unlike openbsd this operating system can
be found not only on servers but is also
used on office computers it can be used
on laptops and even game consoles and
this is actually one of the most popular
systems of the unix family but still
according to statistics no more than
five percent of users were using this
operating system linux back in 2011. now
it's also important to observe the
server here now this is the server of
well probably one of the best technical
institutes in the world mit
massachusetts institute of technology
now
this is used to work with the keys
otherwise the text of the message gives
us very little information i'll only
note that the double space is still in
place but the first line begins with an
extra character
the hyphen looks somewhat out of place
here
this does not look like a
banal typo right 301 is too neat for
this rather it's a sign of direct speech
and it's been put here to enhance the
solemnity of the entire phrase i've
never seen this in letters chats or
messengers and it's actually typical for
books and essays rather the phrase about
patients is kind of hard to understand
now in 2021 when we've got all this
information here but in 2011 it was
absolutely appropriate through 301's
messages on reddit didn't appear
immediately they were actually regularly
added
one by one over a couple of weeks the
second message here is much more
interesting the first line sounds a bit
like a mockery right the key is right in
front of our eyes most likely we're
talking about the symbols in the reddit
header and then the picture actually
jokes about itself take a closer look
the author chose a fragment of a picture
about king arthur as the background of
the stereo image in addition if you know
how to look at stereo pictures you'll be
able to make out something similar to a
cup it seems that this should be
associated with the holy grail right now
according to legend this is the cup into
which the blood of the crucified jesus
flowed and according to legend king
arthur and the knights of the round
table were looking for it according to
legend it gives divine knowledge and
even immortality now i'm starting to
feel like indiana jones and the
following phrase also attracted my
attention but why do you know what the
letters k i s s stand for and no we're
not talking about the name of a
grandfather rock group this is actually
a shortening of one of the main
principles of programming keep it simple
stupid the word
kiss is often used in correspondence by
programmers to slow down overcooked
colleagues and i actually have very
good friends right two very good friends
who are professional programmers and
i've actually seen them use this term
between each other
it seems that now i should take this
advice for myself
[Music]
okay look let's think about the image in
the reddit header
but this is probably the easiest part of
the puzzle i mean what worried
superstitious people the most in 2012
that's right the end of the world
predicted by the mayans there was even a
film about it i had an app on my phone
and it was like count down to the end of
the world it was mad look at the photo
of this steely with the calendar from la
majara do you see similar symbols in the
left hand column yes both on the stone
and in the reddit header maya numbers
are being used
these numbers have long been deciphered
right unlike us the maya used a 20-digit
counting system therefore the full list
of their numbers looks something like
this
see
2 6 8 and 0
in the header clearly coincide with the
arabic numerals of the section title
let's rewrite all the mind numbers in
arabic format and
we'll get the string
10 to 14 7 19 6 18 12 7 8 17 0 19. and
now let's continue with the title right
it's got this strange long form right
and it's beginning coincides with the
mayan key so the letter a turns into 10
e turns into 14 and so on
as a result we end up with the following
sequence
okay looks good but what should we do
with all of this now
do you remember at the beginning of our
quest we decrypted the message with the
caesar code in it all the letters were
shifted by the same value known as the
shift step but what if each letter was
shifted by its own number of steps the
shifting will effectively be determined
by a digital key that is we will shift
the first letter by ten steps the second
by two and so on now such a complicated
kind of shift is called a vignette
cipher the algorithm first appeared
actually fifteen hundred years after
gaius julius's invention but it was not
actually used in practice until the end
of the 16th century when his description
was discovered by blaisdeva kenya now in
those years he worked as an ambassador
in rome and he spent a lot of time in
the vatican library the most interesting
thing is that the principle of
successive permutations of the veganera
formed the basis of enigma a very german
cryptosystem that was hacked by
specialists from bletchley park during
the war now we're gonna applied separate
shifts to each letter and the enigma
mechanism repeated vagueness approach
for encoding a single character but
let's get back to 3301 the classic
vignette substitution table looks like
this
it contains just letters there are no
numbers or signs so we need to alter our
key in accordance with this table there
is a zero in our key so we'll start with
that it will correspond to the letter a
now after the conversion process our
digital key will turn from a combination
of numbers to a combination of letters
voila now we can try to decrypt the
first message using this key and what do
you know it looks like a meaningful text
we managed to decrypt the code book and
now we can actually use this to decrypt
the main text i don't think this is a
little strange and redundant i mean now
that we know the flow of decryption
everything seems quite logical the
individual steps are simple and use
well-known encryption algorithms but the
chain of reasoning is getting longer and
longer i mean at each step we have to
check new programs algorithms and
approaches one person will obviously not
be able to cope with this so maybe this
task was actually initially designed for
collective work right
[Music]
but look let's move on let's remember
actually the main event of that time in
the world of information security was of
course the appearance of lulzek in may
of 2011 lulzek hacked the service of the
american tv channel pbs and actually
posted fake news that the rapper tupac
shakur who was killed in 2006 is
actually alive and hiding from everyone
in new zealand they also published the
usernames and passwords of pbs employees
and the website visitors
the action was perceived as a revenge
for the film about wikileaks and it's
either his way or the highway and it
just really got abusive so to a point
where if you criticized it he was
starting he started to threaten people
then the hackers set their sights on
sony first they hacked the japanese
division of sony music then the belgian
and dutch divisions of sony bmg then
they hacked the network of the sony
pictures film company as a result of
these actions more than 70 000 sony user
accounts were compromised this time the
hackers were taking revenge for the
persecution of the ps3 hackers the
damage to sony was immense and was
measured in millions of dollars but
their competitors from nintendo were
much luckier lulzsec also hacked their
network but they didn't publish the data
they actually said we're not targeting
nintendo we like the n64 too much we
sincerely hope nintendo plugs the gap
well
now on june the 10th the group made the
data of 26 000 government officials who
visited porn.com publicly available
three days later part of the senate.gov
user correspondence became available too
in addition allseg managed to paralyze
the websites of the us senate cia units
and the serious organized crime agency
the soca unexpectedly on the night of
june 26th the group announced its
dissolution in fact lawsec actually
existed only for 50 days but during that
time it managed to commit more than 100
cyber attacks this is kind of surprising
considering that the group consisted of
only seven people of course they
themselves would not be able to cope
with the huge amounts of routine
immunosomos work on hacking such complex
systems so the group's members actually
had adopted the experience of large
companies each of them recruited
third-party performers to work on
different projects the structure was
organized in such a way that many of the
performers didn't actually know what
they were working on
they outsourced everything so maybe 3301
is a recruiter of the same hacker group
this would explain the secrecy and
anonymity unlike government
organizations hackers actually have to
hide in addition it would explain the
specific operating systems and software
that the author of the riddles used
unfortunately there are two strong
arguments against this
even a quick solution of the 3301 quest
does not indicate high qualification in
any way it can't really be used to judge
the knowledge of network technologies
current encryption methods or social
engineering skills real hacker quests
actually look quite different go over to
the wire portable or reversing.kr and
see for yourself unlike 3301's riddles
an untrained person here is unlikely to
understand anything except for maybe
just individual words well secondly the
history of lolsec itself speaks out
against this kind of assumption fbi
agents actually managed to arrest the
group's members right and moreover they
didn't even have to carry out complex
attacks in the cyber world everything
was much simpler
the group was actually handed over by an
embedded informant
traitor snitch
mansour described as a law sec leader
was arrested last year
and sources say he began cooperating
with the fbi
his help led to today's arrests of the
others who are all now charged in a
series of computer attacks on corporate
and government systems and at the
beginning of 2012 literally everyone
knew about it therefore the participants
of real hacker groups were not without
reason afraid of new members they got
rid of participants who even caused a
little bit of suspicion and when you
start to be afraid of old friends it's
really unlikely that you'll be looking
for new ones let alone in such a
suspicious way right
so let's move on to the next level of
our game thanks to the description of
the code book we can decrypt the message
that led us to reddit it's funny that
the texts turned out to be one of the
stories about king arthur right i mean
surely you've encountered them at school
for some reason these stories are loved
by humanity teachers and professors all
over the world well in any case they
might come in handy for you on this
quest
however we
couldn't actually use the original texts
as a key even if we knew that it was
definitely the lady of the fountain
because we need to actually know exactly
how the text was divided into lines in
order to decrypt it
but i'm probably not going to torment
you with all the tedious counting of
strings and characters i mean instead
here's the message we got call us
at us telephone number
2143909 608 now this message radically
changes the rules of the game for the
first time we get a task that isn't
online but actually in the real world
not using a computer but through a
telephone now this convinces me
beyond all doubt that we can forget
about a hacker group affiliation no
would-be hacker would be interested in
going further i mean a call to someone
else's phone always threatens the
anonymity of the caller it's a trap the
owner of the number will be able to find
out where he was called from right and
that's at best at worst cross-device
attacks are possible which i already
told you about actually in the video
about network anonymity let's put it up
here somewhere
but more importantly if i were to
recruit people to a group using the 3301
riddle then anyone who called me would
have immediately failed the test well
anyway i hope you didn't dial the number
in the message and that's not even about
anonymity it's just that that number has
changed owners more than once over the
past 10 years therefore it's really
impossible to actually go through the
entire chain of riddles independently
but if you'd actually done this in 2011
you would have heard the following
recording on the answering machine
very good
you have done well there are three prime
numbers associated with the original
final dot jpeg image
3301
is one of them
you will have to find the other two
multiply all three of these numbers
together and at a dot com on the end to
find the next step
good luck
goodbye
it's kind of strange i mean usually the
puzzle should become more complicated as
you progress but here you don't really
have to think much we've already found a
couple of other numbers in question
right remember we noticed the strange
size of the first picture 503 509
well they are indeed prime numbers and
if you multiply 5 or 3 and 5 and 9 and
then you multiply the result by three
three one you get eight hundred forty
five million one hundred forty five
thousand one hundred twenty seven all
the remains is to add dot com and then
my paranoia kind of kicks in a bit and
it's like you can't do this
i mean in the theory of information
security there is such a concept as a
honey pot
this is the kind of bait that is left in
the secure network to kind of detect
hackers this technique works well on an
elementary basis
imagine that there is a computer on your
network that no one knows about there's
no complex software on it only utility
that records the addresses of those
people who try to access it well what
for well if a person tries to log on to
this computer it means that he has
received its address by alternately
going through all possible addresses in
your network and this is very similar to
those actions of a hacker look it's very
unlikely that you would have visited
845145127.com
having made a typo or having
accidentally picked it up right i mean
the search engines didn't know anything
about it either so everyone who went to
the site directly
definitely was interested in the riddles
of 3301 there could be no casual
visitors there and it seems to me that
this is essentially a honey pot right
this is the second blow to your
anonymity and by the way niels proves
the author of outguess he's actually a
known developer of such bait programs an
interesting coincidence isn't it in any
case like the phone this site has been
long owned by other people i tried to
actually find out what this site looked
like 10 years ago with actually
web.archive.org but i was really set up
for failure the earliest copy of this
site dates back 2013 by that time all of
the information had already been deleted
from it therefore in order to go any
further we need to rely on the memories
of the participants of this quest
so if you went to the website at the
beginning of 2012 you would have seen a
picture with a cicada and a countdown
timer and i'm sure that you would have
first checked this picture without
guests right
there was indeed an encouraging message
in it you have done well to come this
far
patience is a virtue check back at five
o'clock on monday 9th of january 2012
utc 3301 so if you were the first
visitor of this site you just have to
wait but no one could have actually
predicted exactly what would have
happened on january the 9th
on this day a list of gps coordinates
relating to 14 points scattered around
the world appeared on the site now eight
of these coordinates were located in the
united states two of them were actually
both in paris and in seoul one was in
poland and one was actually down under
in australia with lucas in all cases the
coordinates indicated points on the
streets of major cities it seems that
3-301 has finally decided to end the
anonymity of hunters for the holy grail
i mean what could be easier than just
waiting for the quest participant at the
specified location right
but there were still volunteers as you
can imagine and soon photos of all these
places appeared on the network it turned
out that at the specified coordinates
there were ordinary lamp posts on which
posters with the already familiar cicada
and qr codes appeared this is for
example how a lamp post in the center of
warsaw looked like
on the bike shelter over here
see i got a veteran
it quickly became clear that the qr
codes on the pillars are repeated there
are only really two different versions
of the message here's what the first
version read
and this is what the second one looked
like
as you can see this is again a book
cipher and the link to the code book is
now actually given in the form of riddle
i didn't actually spend a long time
looking for that book it was the
creation of the father of the cyberpunk
genre william gibson and this is
actually a small poem called agrippa
book of the dead now this poem was only
disputed on three-inch floppy disks in
addition to the text of the work itself
an encryption program was recorded on
the diskette after you opened the
permanent reddit a program would launch
and the poem would be encrypted at once
[Applause]
so you could really only read it once
and only once
according to gibson's plan this poem
could not be saved copied or read a
second time but reality played a cruel
joke on him
at the presentation the poem was
actually read out aloud by the famous
illusionist pen gillett the text was
projected in parallel on the screen
behind him one of the visitors the
presentation managed to capture what was
happening on video and the next day
well he posted the full text of the work
in open access now in 2012 this story
was again on everyone's lips a
competition was announced on the network
to decrypt the corrupted text of the
poem the prize was complete collection
of gibson's works the code book for the
second encryption turned out to be
volume 6 of the 11th edition of
encyclopedia britannica the required
section included words from chitral to
cincinnati and yeah the word cicada was
also present in it both encryptions led
to the same result a sight address
intended for the darknet
transition to the anonymous darknet puts
an end to another version of what is
happening a network game
such entertainment was rapidly gaining
popularity at that time right sometimes
they're even used for commercial
purposes for example six months before
the appearance of the first riddle of
3301 the code was broadcasted by the bbc
this is basically a three-part
educational film
dedicated to the basic concepts of
modern mathematics and to attract the
attention of the audience the authors of
the film launched basically a series of
mathematical puzzle games on the
internet you need to start is here on
this site so enter the world of the code
now and good luck
and 1 000 participants of the
competition gradually completed tasks
and answered questions relating to the
topics of the film the final test was
actually held offline at the same
bletchley park where alan turing hacked
the enigma code but the nature of this
competition was radically different from
our riddle using tour type software can
be dangerous for inexperienced users if
their computers become exit points for
the dark net they're going to bear
pretty much all responsibility for the
activities of intruders it wasn't
possible to see advertising on 3301 only
open and free software was used to solve
riddles and not so many users coped with
the installation of the same outguess
right most people were just waiting for
the results of other people
alone in the dark
first visitors of this site witnessed an
email address field and an invitation to
the next level of the game but look pay
attention to the first paragraph here it
contains instructions that are pretty
obvious for any tour user who would even
think of installing and configuring
special software designed to protect the
anonymity of
themselves and then
give their real email address i mean
this is frankly an unnecessary
recommendation in my opinion
but the second paragraph is much more
interesting it assumes that individual
tasks will be formed for each applicant
of the game and the achieved result will
be then recorded this is kind of how the
newly developed remote learning systems
were designed at that time remember that
the decrypted page address quickly
spread among those interested in 3 301
riddles and soon unsurprisingly the text
changed you've shared too much at this
point we want the best not the followers
thus the first few there will receive
the prize naturally the field for
entering an email address had also
disappeared and it's not known for sure
what tasks came next for those
participants who managed to register and
how many of them there actually were
i actually came across several variants
of individual tasks on the web with the
classic cryptographic task of finding
prime factors of a large number the task
of decrypting a fragment of melody and
midi but these are all just separate
pieces of the mosaic really we can only
say for sure that soon a new picture
appeared on reddit where the first
riddle with a book encryption was posted
3301 kept its promise
new puzzles appeared in january 2013 and
2014. in 2017 the trail of another chain
of riddles surfaced but the authors of
all of these stories never actually
revealed themselves
[Music]
so what was the mystery of 3301 really
i'm not sure i know the answer and i'm
sorry you've waited this long to
understand that but before we go on i
want to ask you have you noticed that in
this video occasionally a small picture
of a cicada appears in the corner of the
screen for a few moments it was written
by a pedantic and middle-aged american
the academic style of text design th
from cambridge university of a
mathematics student from hamburg typical
for books and essays rather feel like
indiana jones by humanities teachers and
professors all over the world father of
the cyberpunk genre william gibson
educational film
dedicated to the basic concepts of
modern mathematics most people were just
waiting for the results of other people
newly developed remote learning systems
were designed at that time so with the
use of those markers i actually noted
the key points that i would use in
making a conclusion once you've ruled
out the impossible whatever remains
however improbable must be true
riddle 3 301 is a next generation
educational game project remember while
talking about the story i explained the
basic encryption algorithms we remember
the work of world war ii decryptors and
we talked about modern hacker groups
classical english literature and modern
digital art also surfaced in the riddles
and also unusual software features of
network security features of the
declaration of independence and also the
secrets of gold miners if you watch this
video at the end it's likely that you're
as captivated by this mystery as i am
but imagine for a minute that instead of
watching our video today
10 years ago you were scouring forums
and chats in search of tips and
solutions you read discussions you
argued you learned new words and terms
the world of cryptography and big maths
is getting closer and closer towards you
all this reminds me of dan brown's books
from which millions of people learned
about the unusual sculptures in rome and
the mysteries of leonardo da vinci's
paintings
is it true that such a detective story
is much more interesting than ordinary
textbooks and lectures
maybe
and in this format the decryption of
riddles was very easy to control if the
participants were standing in one place
stagnating or they had reached a dead
end it was very easy to just
suggest some solution on the same 4chan
completely anonymously well look the
more hype there was around the project
the more young people would learn about
it the more likely it is that at least
one of them is going to connect their
future with mathematics cryptography or
programming this works like contextual
advertising let only one person out of a
thousand click on the ad but if you show
the ad to 10 million visitors you'll
make a ton of cash
and never discount the indirect evidence
remember the style of text is a
characteristic of middle-aged and
well-educated americans this person
clearly has access to very specific
academic literature i mean how many of
you have access to the 11th edition of
the
britannica in your bookcase from here a
student program for steganography and a
server with mit addresses appeared and
it's not difficult for a professor to
arrange such a thing with the appearance
of posters around the world if necessary
both students and colleagues are around
to help so that's what it could be just
a
middle-aged cryptography teacher trying
to advertise this course to a few
would-be undergrads
but anyway by the way can you guess why
the image of a cicada was used well
researchers of 331 like to associate
this with the fact that the breeding
cycles of these insects are tied to
prime numbers larvae of different
species of cicada developing the ground
for five seven eleven and even seventeen
years and as i've already said prime
numbers are the basis of modern
cryptography it's beautiful but we've
got one small step left in the early 90s
a group of young scientists at the
barclay institute worked on the problems
of cryptography encryption and anonymity
for the tasks they used the domain name
cicada.barclay.com
this is mentioned in the distributions
of several programs old correspondence
and the legendary cyberpunk mailing list
surely you've heard of that among its
participants were the creator of the pgp
system philip zimmerman right tour
developer jacob applebaum timothy may
from insult and even the ideologist of
wikileaks julian assange uh a
coincidence i don't think so
maybe it's just because cicadas aren't
going anywhere in a hurry in any case my
name is bradley peake thank you for
joining me on another laudable
loquacious albeit longer than usual
journey through the online jungle and i
will see you in the next video
by the way guys i realize we haven't
covered everything about cicada and
unfortunately we couldn't do so without
making it the length of a netflix
documentary so if you would like to
check out the script and also more
information about cicada we've actually
created a website for you so feel free
to follow it and learn more about the
mystery that has perplexed the community
for over 10 years
[Music]
you