On a dull winter evening, Eriksson, a 34-year-old Swede, was browsing the internet when he stumbled upon an image with a message written in white on a black background. The message read: "We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a 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 who will make it to the end. Good luck."
Intrigued by the message, Eriksson, an encryption expert, realized that there was a secret hidden in the digital file of the image. This technique, known as steganography, involves hiding codes by making minute changes to the original digital file, and it is used by criminals and intelligence agencies alike. For example, a slight color change in every 100th pixel could reveal a hidden image within the original one. Some experts even believe that al-Qaeda has used this technique to communicate with its members through publicly accessible websites.
In the image file, Eriksson found references to the Roman Emperor Claudius and some random letters. He suspected that these letters could be a Caesar cipher, a type of encryption attributed to Julius Caesar that involves replacing each letter with another a certain number of places down the alphabet. For example, if you use a shift of one, "A" becomes "B," and so on.
Since Claudius was the fourth Roman emperor, Eriksson decided to shift the letters four places back in the alphabet. This led him to an encrypted URL hidden within the image.
To his surprise, the URL took him to a website with a picture of a yellow duck and the text: "Hmm… You've taken the wrong turn. Looks like you can't find the message."
Undeterred, Eriksson thought the duck and the message could be another clue. He decided to run the image through a decoding program called "OutGuess." Another surprise awaited him: a hidden message led him to a forum on the popular website Reddit.
On the forum, complex ciphers and symbols used by the Mayan civilization appeared. Decoding these led to yet another cipher.
Eriksson recalls, "So far, the symbols and ciphers didn't require advanced skills... but things started to get complicated after this point."
The puzzles began to involve hexadecimal systems (usually, the decimal system is used—think of a percentage as a decimal system and imagine it being out of 16). The puzzles also employed techniques such as reverse engineering, prime number sequences, and always featured an image of a cicada.
Eriksson notes, "I learned that the life cycle of cicadas is based on prime numbers (like 13 or 17) to avoid the life cycles of their predators... now the pieces of the puzzle were starting to fit together."
In the previous stage, Eriksson analyzed the Mayan symbols, which led him to a cipher that, in turn, led him to a poem telling the story of the English King Arthur receiving manuscripts of local religious texts from the Welsh county dating back to pre-Christian times.
From there, he was directed to an electronic poem published by William Gibson in 1992 on floppy disks programmed to delete their content after the poem was read just once.
At this point, thousands of programmers began collaborating to solve the puzzles on forums known for hosting discussions by anarchists and hackers.
One of them informed Eriksson that decrypting the hidden cipher in the poem led to the message: "Call us at 9608-390-214."
Calling the number, which was based in Texas, a recorded message instructed callers to return to the first stage and extract the prime numbers from the original image. By multiplying the numbers together, Eriksson found a new prime number that turned out to be a website address: 845145127.com. Here, a countdown clock appeared along with the cicada symbol.
When the countdown reached zero, the clock vanished and was replaced by GPS coordinates pointing to 14 locations around the world: in Warsaw, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Arizona, California, New Orleans, Miami, Hawaii, and Sydney.
Thousands of seekers raced to the GPS locations, where they found posters on streetlight poles displaying the cicada symbol and a QR code—a black-and-white barcode designed to be read by a smartphone camera, leading to a website, and from there to a hidden site on Tor.
After a certain number of visitors had accessed the site, a message appeared: "We want the best, not followers."
This is where Eriksson's story ends; he was considered one of the "followers" by Cicada's standards. But what happened to the lucky ones who accessed the site before him? No one knows for sure, and here we enter the realm of speculation, not facts, keeping the Cicada mystery alive and continuing to intrigue the world.
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