Cicada 3301: A Castle built upon Sand
December 16, 2024
Synopsis
On the 4th of January, 2012, the internet saw the birth of one of the most elaborate, complex, and intriguing puzzles to date. An anonymous user going by
3301 sought intelligent individuals. For what purpose? Nobody knew. Who was behind it? Nobody knew that either. Until now.
Solution
I am confident that, as of today, we are extremely close to figuring out who
I personally think that Cicada lives on the west coast, more specifically in the Pacific Northwest. However, due to certain mistakes Cicada made in their posts (mostly grammar and spelling mistakes), I think that they are not actually Amercian/Candadian, but from Central Europe, e.g. Germany, France, Italy, Denmark, Austria, etc., as the mistakes mostly lines up with what would be correct in those countries' languages. I'm not 100% sure about this, however. I can speak German, and the mistakes present in some of Cicada's text would be correct if the text were German.
Cicada 3301 actually is. After calling in a good friend of mine and analysing the data, we came up with the following theory:
Cicada 3301 is a single person, and probably immature also. The main point of reference for the first point are the timings and dates, which do not span the entire day/week respectively. We also think that realistic places of residency for Cicada are either coast (east/west) of the United States or Canada, the United Kingdom, or mainland Europe. Our second point, that Cicada is probably immature, then comes from the fact that we were able to figure out that Cicada is very likely to be a single person, as any sophisticated individual would've thought through how to make it seem like one person is actually multiple.
I personally think that Cicada lives on the west coast, more specifically in the Pacific Northwest. However, due to certain mistakes Cicada made in their posts (mostly grammar and spelling mistakes), I think that they are not actually Amercian/Candadian, but from Central Europe, e.g. Germany, France, Italy, Denmark, Austria, etc., as the mistakes mostly lines up with what would be correct in those countries' languages. I'm not 100% sure about this, however. I can speak German, and the mistakes present in some of Cicada's text would be correct if the text were German.
The GitHub repository
In the video, I briefly mention a GitHub repository. However, that does not work as of right now. This is why I have moved all of that investigative material to here.
Audio
- LEMMiNO - Cipher
- YouTube
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- LEMMiNO - Nocturnal
- YouTube
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- LEMMiNO - Triangular
- YouTube
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Every Track an Essay - Fusion
- SoundCloud
- CC BY 4.0 / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (unsure)
- Q - Worldwide
- YouTube
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Q - Lure
- YouTube
- CC BY-SA 4.0
Visuals
- Stock footage (Pixabay)
- Counting money
- Stock footage (Pexels)
- Handwriting
- Cityskape At Night Time
- Traffic On An Intersection Road In A City
- View From Airplane Flying Above Clouds
- Black and White 4K Footage of Arc de Triomphe, Paris, France
- Time Lapse of an Avenue at Night
- Lake and Modern Skyscrapers
- Person Working On His Laptop
- A Person Typing On A Laptop Keyboard
- The Sun Illuminating Earth's Surface
- A Computer Monitor Flashing Digital Information
- Two People in Guy Fawkes Masks Using Computers
- Static Picture On An Old Television Screen
- Time Lapse Video of Clouds in the Sky
- Man Texting on His Smartphone
- Photo of Agrippa
- the agrippa files
- Photo of the Mabinogion
- Tumblr
- Birds of Rhiannon; gilgret
- final.jpg
- Imgur
- m9sYk.jpg (the duck image)
- Imgur
- The everywhere image
- Uncovering Cicada Wiki
- The Valēte! image
- Hushmail logo
- Logos-world
- The posters
- Photo of a poster found in Paris
- Photo of a poster found in Seattle
- Photo of a poster found in Warsaw
- Uncovering Cicada Wiki
- The questionnaire
- Imgur
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Nov. 24, 2021 Near & Q
This was originally in a GitHub repository but that doesn't work, so it was moved.
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May 19, 2024 LEMMiNO
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May 27, 2020 Matt Brassil
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Sep. 05, 2021 S. Flannagan
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Fandom
This wiki documents the puzzles quite well.
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Reddit
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GitHub
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Twitter
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#9 Cicada 3301 is accused of hacking
A Chilean news oganization accused Cicada of hacking, to which Cicada promptly issued a response.
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#a PDI warns of a new method of scamming through Google
Apr. 11, 2012 Andes Online
- #b Cicada's response
Apr. 18, 2012
Notice the British spelling of the word
organisations
, as well as a missingwe
in the last sentence.
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#a PDI warns of a new method of scamming through Google
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#10 Cicada 3301 is accused of cyberterrorism
- #a Anti-abortion hackers attack Planned Parenthood, release databases, employee data
Jul. 27, 2015 William Turton The Daily Dot
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#b Report: Anti-Abortion Activists Claim to Have Hacked Planned Parenthood
Jul. 27, 2015 Megan Friedman ELLE
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#c Cicada's response
Jul. 28, 2015
Here, too, Cicada uses the British spelling of the word
organisations
.
- #a Anti-abortion hackers attack Planned Parenthood, release databases, employee data
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#11 The leaked email
- #a Untitled
Pastebin
This is the first version of the email to be leaked. Notice the large amount of mistakes: This is not the actual email but merely a 'depersonalised' version; every version of the email had unique punctuation, sentence structure, etc., which this removes entirely.
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#b Untitled
Pastebin
This is one of the unique emails featuring one version of the punctiation, sentence structure, etc.
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#c Email is PGP Verified
UCW
This is another version of the email.
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#d Untitled
Pastebin
I sadly cannot remember how I found this version, but I believe that this was sent to the 8145145127.com website.
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#e Another recruitment message (with a different signature)
Apr. 23, 2024 u/ymgve Reddit
A Reddit user shared this version of the email, which they themselves received ~11 years prior. According to them, they have not received any other messages after, despite applying for a membership.
- #a Untitled
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Jan. 10, 2012 habitres YouTube
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Gutenberg