#988- Cicada 3301

For anybody who doesn't know what the hell I'm talking about here today we are going to be talking about Cicada thirty three oh one. Before we get started here, Raven, have you ever heard of Cicada three thirty one?

based out of you know, geolocations. Then you know, as time went on, there was fourteen locations around the world that you had to go and like scan this QR code. And so it wasn't just you know, nerds in their basement just tapping away on the computer to find these codes. You actually had to get out of your house and go find these things. And that led to another call, not that yeah.

ancient Nordic rooms. Those came up. That's actually the last code that has yet to be deciphered. It's a it's called Liber Primus, and it is a series of Nordic rune runic messages that only I think one out of the twelve has been decoded.

they are not doing any kind of illegal acts. And as a matter of fact, they knew who the people were that were making it this far because they're smart, and they were letting them know that if you are somebody who is engaging any legal activities, either stop your shit now or you're no longer continuing. We're not gonna ask questions if you don't want to continue, but understand that we ain't about that kind of shit either. And it's like, so is this like it's crazy weird.

think tank, this activist group. Who knows, who knows, But we do know that in twenty seventeen was the last time that a message was sent out from Cicada thirty three to ZHO one. And allegedly no one has deciphered it yet. However, I think that some have and they just can't talk about it. There's tons of speculation, there's tons of theories as to what this was, who this was from, what was the overarching point of it all.

You know, some of these people they think, which we're going to actually hear a clip from the Wi Fi I was good old WiFi, I'll shout out. He believes that this was a thing for the government, right, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the whatever, to try to find

the greatest hacking minds there were. But then when people got to the final endpoint, they realized that that's what it was, and they just decided to stop because they didn't want to work for the government because they were loving the puzzle solving, right, It's like a dopamine hit.

And then when they figured out that all this was to get a government job, they're like, nah, I just wanted to decode puzzles, so dip out Like there's tons, there's tons of theories, and none of them are any more or less crazy or stupid than the other, because no one knows.

cult members. If you would like to see the articles in the videos that we are gonna be playing on this episode rather than just hear us talk about it, the only place you can go would be too patreon dot com slash Cult Conspiracy Podcasts. When you go there, we have a couple of tiers for entry. If you go to that five dollars a month tier, you will get to see all the articles, all the videos. You'll get these shows a couple of days in advance, sometimes

even a week in advance. But probably the main reason why you're gonna go over to Patreon is because it is the only place to get these shows absolutely local fun. That's right.

The Patreon dot com slash cult Podcasts. That lowest tiers only five dollars a moth, But if you sign up for that third eye all the way Open tier, you get to join us every Tuesday night for our cult member live show that we host every Tuesday night, nine pm Central, and then we also have the Cult Maniac Tier and if you go there, we actually have a couple of extra add ons that we give Raven Lee if you would give the rundown.

This is the image that started at all So Cicada thirty three oh one is the name given eight sets of puzzles posted under the name thirty three oh one online between twenty twelve and twenty fourteen. The first puzzle started on January fourth, twenty twelve, on four chan. As always, anything of the deep Web has to start on four cham, but don't worry. The dark Web makes its appearance into this.

Ancient literature makes its appearance into this. Some would even say occult symbolism, because it was always about achieving enlightenment. We're we're gonna get to it anyway, and it ran for nearly a month. A second round of puzzles began one year and one day later actually in twenty thirteen, and then a third round following the confirmation of a fresh clue posted on Twitter on January fourth, twenty fourteen.

The third puzzle remains unsolved. The stated intent was to recruit quote unquote intelligent individuals by presenting a series of puzzles to be solved. No new puzzles were published on January fourth, twenty fifteen. A new clue was posted on Twitter on January fifth, twenty sixteen, and Cicada thirty three oh one posted their last verified open PGP signed message on April or in April twenty seventeen, denying the validity of any unsigned puzzle. So they start using PGP, which

stands for pretty Good Protection. Basically it's it's like an IP address, so basically you can verify if this is being sent from the source that it's claiming. Because there was tons of people that were like, uh, it's false. Cicadas that were sending out messages to make people start decoding them in things, but they were very clear, no, no check the PGP like this. If it's not verified, US don't even fuck with it. The puzzles focused heavily

on data security, cryptography, steganography, and Internet anonymity. We're gonna talk about what steganography and some of these other things that they used was. It was quite ingenious.

to our own personal theories towards the end. Others have stated Cicada thirty three oh one is an alternate reality game, although no company or individual has attempted to monetize it. Yeah, there's nobody benefited from this. They were never selling anything. It was about seeing if you were smart enough to figure it. I mean, who's to say, right anyway, So, the stated purpose of the puzzles each year was to recruit highly intelligent individuals, although the ultimate purpose remains unknown.

Theories have included claims that Cicada thirty three oh one is a secret society with the goal of improving cryptography, privacy and anonymity, or that it is a cult or religion. According to statements of several people who won the twenty twelve puzzle, thirty three oh one typically uses non puzzle based recruiting methods, but created the Cicada puzzle because they were looking for potential members with cryptography and computer security skills. So we're going to get into some of the more

in depth looks at all of this. This article is from The Guardian as a matter of fact, and it talks about the person who tried and had failed to actually break the code here Cicada thirty three oh one. I tried the hardest puzzle on the Internet and failed spectacularly. On screen right now you'll see some Nordic runes, some

in red, some in black, in the Cicada. It might seem a little weird, but this is actually part of a puzzle, and this is if I'm not mistaken, it's part of the puzzle that has not been solved to this day, so no one knows who sets it up up sets it or what the prize is at the end. But Cicada thirty three oh one is back for its third year and the internet has gone wild. So this

was actually posted. Where's the date on this one? I just want to see if it's a if this person did it relatively recently or not, And I see nothing.

It couldn't be that hard, right wrong. Cicada thirty three oh one first appeared in January twenty twelve, with the picture posted on four Chan the notorious message board which has given birth to everything from log cats to Anonymous. Yeah, we're talking about the q Andon people, which some believe. That's also what Cicada thirty three to old one was. They were looking for recruits for QAnon. I don't know, we're gonna we're gonna talk, We're gonna get there anyway.

that make it all the way through. Good luck thirty three oh one. Every one of their messages was signed thirty three oh one at the end. So whenever you went in and you found the code and you did the things, this image would pop up. It was a duck and it said whoops, just decoys. This way looks like you can't guess how to get the message out. Now, here's the deal. Within this message, within this image, there is a code. Out guess is a software program that

you can use to decode things. But unless you knew that, or at least it knew that that was what they were trying to go here, you would have thought, oh god, what is this? And I remember seeing this image and everybody's like, it's the purple thing behind the wing. That's the clue. It's got to be No. Out guests was the clue, and you were supposed to take this image to go to out guests and go from there. But anyway, let's continue. That message led to a series of puzzles,

each harder than the last. The first few were just about as solvable as a canny individual working alone, requiring little more than mild coding ability and wordplayed to get passed, but as participants fell deeper into the rabbit hole, the references became less obvious. One clue involved a poem from a collection of medieval Welsh manuscripts. Another a quote from a William Gibson book which was only released on a

three point five inch floppies. Yeah, you had to go and find a floppy disc of this book from William Gibson to find the code within the paragraphs to decode the message.

posts over five different nations. From Poland to Austria. It was clear that no single could hope to solve everything, but as quickly as the cooperation was encouraged, it was snuffed out. The final puzzle directed players to an address for a website on tour. Yes, that would be the Dark Internet. We're going on to now the anonymous browser now best known for its use by the Silkrow black market. But only the fastest movers got to see what was on this page. It was shortly blanked and replaced with

a statement we want the best, not the followers. For those deemed followers, Cicada was over. So it's like, and I don't know the actual numbers here, if it was like the first five hundred people to get to that website and then five ozho one the website was shut down, and so it was, and then if you shared whatever was on that website, you were kicked out and they would send you an email basically thanking you for your time.

Wild things. So now let's get into the repetition here. Then, on January fifth, twenty thirteen, one year and one day later after the first, a new image was uploaded onto four chan's b message board, saying hello again. Our search for intelligent individuals now continues. Again, this image led to a series of puzzles. Again, the puzzles eventually point to locations in the real world, and again the trail was

abruptly closed off to all but the best players. Those who failed two years in a row had no choice but to wait and hope the pattern would repeat itself. It did. This year's puzzle began slightly different. Rather than an image posted on four cham, a Twitter feed which had been involved in the twenty thirteen's hunt sprang to life again, sharing yet another image of white text on a black background, albeit one with more gnomic text than

ever before. Says, Hello, epiphany is upon you. Your pilgrimage has begun. Enlightenment awaits now. You see how it's kind of dipping into some of the more occult themes, the spiritual things, you know.

one large companies, five smaller companies. They're apparently they're using the term that they actually call themselves, the Kada three thirty one.

It says, in fact, it could have been stated or I'm sorry, In fact, it couldn't have started any worse is when he was trying to decipher it in twenty fourteen. There are two messages buried in the image file. The first is easy enough to get. The black image isn't actually pure black. Instead, it's very dark gray, and he is the image of the cicada. A couple of seconds messing at the color levels and photoshop and it made

it visible. So this was the original image, and once you messed around with photoshop a little bit, you were able to see the cicada. Okay, cool, So that was like the first bit on here. Unfortunately, the actually important message was harder to get. As with the previous two years, the image included text hidden with steganography, a technique which lets users bury information in seemingly innocuous files. To get the information out, require me to use a program called

out guests. To install out Guests, I need to compile the program from the source. To do that, I need to install x code, the MACOSX developer tools. Create a new command line project based on the source code I downloaded, reconfigure the program for Mac, deal with the dependency issues, build it, and then run it from the terminal. This is to do the first that was a lot. That was.

he could solve this puzzle. He actually is the one of the ones that showed me the dark Web and like how to get to it and do all this stuff. And he's like, oh, yeah, you go here in this code, in this code, and I'm like, you know, oh, I'm smart in some ways.

had to know that. What they meant was, oh, you got to go to out guests, which, like most people is never going to know what guess is, They're never gonna know to download that and then all this other stuff that was just listed out, install x code, go to the developer tools, compare it or do the discrepancies for Mac and all that. Like this to a tech person, oh yeah, I could bust that out in my ten minutes,

no problem. D For regular people like you and I and most of our cult members were like, I'm sorry, that was a whole lot of gibberation. It sounded real tech knowlogy, and there's that you know. So all right, So maybe.

and solved the puzzle. As I look at the solution, my hope begins to melt. It's really mind boggling, ob twose a mind bogglingly obtuse. Okay, So here was the solution. The text, which can be extracted from the image is split into three parts. The third is just a signature proof that the image really does come from Cicada and that it isn't it hasn't been tampered with. But above it is the next step of the puzzle. The first

part reads like a poem. I'm gonna I'm gonna do my best to read this and make it sound like it's from them, but hear me out the work of a private man who wished to be transcend, or who wished to transcend he trusted himself to produce from within. That's followed by a series of numbers separated by colon's one, colon two, colon three, colon one, slash three, colon three, colon thirteen, colon five, slash forty five, colon five, colon two, colon three, and so on cat with the word dot onion.

That last bit means that the solution, when found, will be the URL to another website on tour, following the pattern of the previous year. So once again you gotta go to the dark web. So even after you do all of these other things, you're gonna have to go to a tour browser just to go to the next step. So I don't know what the uh, what the sourcing means, what the code, the symbolisms, the sequencing. I have no idea, but apparently people were easy.

King Arthur that people have to make that comparison. And it's like, I wait what, and it's it's all over the place.

to a code. The first digit is the paragraph, the second is the sentence, the third is the word, and the fourth letter the fourth is the letter. But which book? So this is called a Caesar cipher by the way. And as a matter of fact, there was a code or excuse me, a treasure map that was used for this. Have you ever heard of the Beal ciphers.

And apparently the second page was decoded using the Decoration of Independence, so the Declaration of Independence was used in the same way that those numbers were. This is the paragraph, this is the line, this is the word, and this is the letter. And from that you're able to take and figure out the location of the gold, or so they say. Anyway, but we don't know what number one and number three of the Beal ciphers are actually entailing.

Number two is the only one that's ever been decoded, and they knew that that was supposed to be used from the Decoration of Independence. We have no idea what document or what book. Number one and number three was supposed to be decoded from. So there are other ciphers and other maps that have been used in a very similar fashion. So whenever you see these numbers, so this is page one, paragraph two, word three, and then the first letter of that word. So from that you're able

to take this and figure out which book right. So let's read this here It says your help is greatly appreciated, but please use as many headings as you can to break long documents in smaller chunks. By placing a section under headings two, it gets its own edit button next to heading, thus making it easier to edit. Try to put new header eight height of one screen. You can edit only smaller chunks without having code of whole document on one screen. It also prevents collisions since many authors

can edit text under different headers at the same time. Also, keep in code form all strings we got from outguests so they are searchable in Wilder. I think that's how it's kind of blurry as far as these words concerned. Also, don't delete multiple links to same pacete. Those paces are not forever. We need them as backups. Keep as many different links. Paste bind pasty info toom and in Wikia

as possible. Also, do not delete things that might be possible hents for next step, even if they do not seem important at the moment, they may be relevant later. Thanks to everyone for contributing. So this is basically the Circado wiki, right, they had people that at this time, we're still trying to share information to find the clues later on, whenever it was revealed that like, no, that'll work for a point, like working together is going to be a critical thing for this, and then yeah, no

more working together. We need to know if you're trustworthy as an individual.

something and leave something. It's usually like a toy, a challenge coin, maybe money, or whatever the case would be here's the deal. I don't know how many people have actually used like grid coordinates to find a specific location. Whenever human error is a thing, it is not so easy. So whenever you're giving somebody some sort of a latitude and longitude for the city of New Orleans bro on

which city block that might actually be, is insane. And so these people were just they had to figure it out.

Once you've received it, come back to this page and append a slash, and then the number you received to this URL. For example, if you received and it gives a massive number, then you will go to http slash and then it gives this whole website and its signed thirty three Toho one.

It's like the most frustrating cryptic crossword ever, with no conventions, no help as it to length, no way of checking whether you've got the right answer beyond seeing whether the URL works. The answer, apparently is American author Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Self Reliance. Here's the community's explanation as to

why direct quote here poem references Transcendentalism right. Emerson is a noted Transcendentalist author, he trusted himself refers to trust thine self, which is a theme throughout self reliance as it or as is producing from with them. I do not think I would have gotten that on my own, says the author. So the community, there's only been one trustworthy piece of information as to who lies behind Cicada. It comes from an email leaked by one of the

quote unquote winners of the twenty twelve challenge. It's impossible to verify fully because the leaker was forced to remove the signature to keep their identity secret, but others who receive the same email indicated that the contents were legitimate. This is a direct quote you'll have You have all wondered who we are. It reads in part, and so we shall now tell you. We are an international group. We have no name, we have no symbol, we have no membership roster, we do not have a public website,

and we do not advertise ourselves. We are a group of individuals who have proven ourselves much like you have by completing this recruitment contest, and we are drawn together by common beliefs. A careful reading of the text used in this context would have revealed some of the of these beliefs that tyranny and oppression of any kind must end, that censorship is wrong, and that privacy is an inalienable right.

That doesn't give much. Yeah, however, it does sound very much like the anonymous hacker group, right, and other hacker mercenary groups that have come forward. So this is the Cicada puzzle that you're supposed to be able to put into a source code and get that out. Okay, yeah again, I'm if I was smart enough and new tech enough would be down. But boyl boy, I'm.

or a publicity stunt. For the launch of Halo two, Microsoft did something very similar, launching an alternate reality game called I Love Bees. Some of you that were alive and was popping off at that time might remember it, but neither here nor there. But that game ran for just three months before it ended with an invitation to play the game. Cicada is now on its third year,

and again, this was in twenty fourteen. Similarly, the security services have been known to recruit through puzzles and games, but when GCHQ invited people to solve a code to get a job, they did so on a site plastered with their branding, and it begs beggars belief that they or the NSA would seriously start a hunt for spies on four Chan. I hear that, But also so, if you're looking for hackers who have a certain type of belief system and understand the internet and mean culture to

that level, where else would you recruit from? That's just me But okay, okay. At the same time, Takeda must be the work of more than one person with some hefty resources. So far, physical artifacts from the group have appeared in eight nations and eleven US states. It has brought phone numbers, paid for server up time, and offered something to the winners, which has earned their silence. So now last chance. I decided to have one last try

it solving a puzzle. To stave off temptation to cheat, I would try to solve the most recent cipher, a seventy character code reading I'm not going to read. It's a bunch of letters and numbers beside the point which has been found by combining two previously discovered answers. Eavesdropping on the chat channel, I see someone point out that the Enigma code was formatted in the same way. They link to an Enigma simulator and I gave it a go.

The most common version of the Enigma has a key of four letters, so there is a little less than half a million combinations. Yeah, that's that works. After half an hour of trying to every four letter phrase I could think of, that's a CADO may have picked based on every previous clue. I gave up and go to bed. In the morning. When I check again, the puzzle has been solved. Involved putting the letters into thirteen columns and shuffling the order around until a legible sentence appeared. The

enigma theory does not even warrant a mention. The answers leads to another dark website with another image and more puzzles, which remains incomprehensible to me. When I leave the chat room, they are discussing a large chunk of data found between two images and yet another dark website. I gave it a go and do the G two crossword instead. So this is the uh, this is a hold on this is an article on it, but anyway, so that's pretty

much the end of the Guardian article. This guy tried in twenty fourteen and it was way beyond his comprehension, which for record, I get there. There's no shame behind most of us, and which that was the point. This was not something that they wanted millions of people shooting

their shot in. They wanted you, if you were going to try to make it into Cicada, they wanted to know that you knew what the hell you were doing and able to think outside of the box, outside of the web, into the real world, into ancient texts, into decoding the unknown. It was everything all at once.

They did, and we talked about that. In twenty seventeen, they released a statement. Ever since twenty seventeen, everything's been silent.

it here. The Internet has been home to countless cryptic puzzles, but fewer have sparked as much intrigue and speculation as Cicada thirty three oh one. This mysterious organization emerged in twenty twelve, posting an elaborate puzzle that sent thousands of solvers on a global scavenger hunt involving advanced cryptography staganography, which is hidden messages within images and sounds, and real

World Treasure hunts. Over the years, multiple challenges appeared, leading participants through an intricate maze of hidden messages and complex ciphers. But was the ultimate goal of Cicada thirty three to oh one? Who was behind it? And why did it suddenly vanish? To this day, no definite answer exists, leaving Cicada thirty three oh one is one of the most intriguing unsolved mysteries of the Internet. So let's get into

it here. We talked about this on January fourth, twenty twelve, and anonymous black and white image appeared on four chance b message board with the following text, and we talked about this. As participants developed deeper, they encountered a variety of challenges requiring expertise in cryptography, staganography, classical literature, programming

in cybersecurity, and geographic location decoding. So when we talk about the cryptography, a Caesar cipher is a version of this, which is probably the most base line that you can get. So I'll give you an example of this. So let's say that I was to give you a letter, like I handwrote a letter to you, and it's not words. There's a letters that would form words but none of

them actually make sense. And I told you that there's a Caesar cipher on this with a plus four variable, so A would become d, b would become e. Right, So you take whatever letter it is, add four and when you get to the end of the alphabet you wrap around again. This is the very baseline of a code. As far as that goes, right, it's very easy to decipher as long as you have the key if it's a plus four, a plus ten, whatever the case would be,

or a minus for that matter. But they got into some source code shit that I I've never even heard of some of these things, for instance, So we talked about the Beel ciphers, right, that's just number code. The Veneer Visioneer cipher is another one. It's it's Egypt, It's it may no goddamn sense to me. I watched videos, you know what. Let's see pulling up the images, so you have to basically see it makes words in a diagonal way, a left right way or right to left way,

and you have to use code like this to debunk it. Basically.

not even in this conversation, right. This was for people whose brains operate on borderline weaponized autism, which is fine, yeah, but yeah, so anyway, the steganography, like I said, is hidden messages within images and sounds like whenever you would take that image and you play with the font and you play with the color a little bit and it shows the cicada. That's baseline. Later on they discovered that you had to find three and I'm sure it's gonna

be brought up here in a minute. There was like three numbers that you would need off of this image. Thirty three zho one was one of them, and that was it, and it was the black and white image. Where's the other numbers? Is it in the lettering? Is it in the cicada itself? What's up? No, it was in the pixels for this way and this way. It was like five thirteen and five nineteen pixels that were both prime numbers, and so is thirty three oh one.

These prime numbers plugged into their algorithm and their shit gave you an answer that would lead to another question, another puzzle, another clue. It's like, what the hell?

of this. From twenty twelve to twenty fourteen, Cicada thirty three oh one released three major puzzle events in January of twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, and twenty fourteen. Every year the challenges became more advanced, drawing in thousands of solvers around the world. I would argue probably hundreds, but all right. In the twenty twelve puzzle right, The first puzzle began

with the now famous image posted on four CHAM. It guided solvers through digital clues, encryption techniques, and even real world locations. Those who made it to the end reportedly received an email from Cicada confirming that they had reached the final stage. What happened after that remains unknown, as those selected were likely instructed to remain silent, which that checks out right. The twenty thirteen puzzle. A year latest, Akida launched a new puzzle with a similar format, but

this time it featured more complex cryptographic tasks. It required deeper knowledge of mathematics, programming, and historical references. Like the first puzzle, it ended quietly with no public announcement or verified outcome. Then the twenty fourteen puzzle. The third puzzle, introduced something new, the Liber Primus, a book written entirely runic characters. Some pages have been decoded, revealing philosophical messages

in riddles, but large portions remain unsolved. Many people believe that Liber Primus holds the final key to understanding Cicada thirty three to OHO one's true purpose. After twenty fourteen, no new verified puzzles were released by Cicada, apart from a disputed message in twenty sixteen warning of impostors. The

group went silent, leaving the mystery open and unfinished. So the thirty three toh one cipher puzzles UH puzzles were incredibly complex, drawing on cryptography, literature, and advanced problem solving techniques. Each step required deep knowledge of encryption, coding, and historical text. Here's the breakdown of some of the key puzzle elements, so steganography hidden messages in images. One of the earliest puzzles used steganography, the practice of concealing information within images.

The first clue a black and white image posted on four Chan containing contained text hidden in its code. Solvers used steganoography tools like outguests, a universal free software that conceals information in the redundant bits of data sources such as images, to extract a message leading to a cryptic URL. This technique appears repeatedly throughout the puzzle series, often hidden

or hiding encoded instructions within seemingly ordinary images. So you needed the out guests to even begin to solve this shit.

So it's like because he's a genius of a different type of breed, of a different category, if you know what I'm saying.

A might become D with a shift of three. I said four earlier. That'd be a three. Excuse me. Many solvers used online Caesar cipher decoders to help crack these codes. Now there's RSA and PGP encryption. Both are types of public key cryptography used to encrypt and decrypt messages securely. RSA is widely used encryption algorithm, while PGP, which stands for pretty Good Privacy, allows people to send encrypted messages that only the intended recipient can read. Their use in

the puzzle suggests a strong focus on privacy and secure communication. Okay. Modular arithmetic a math concept used in many encryption systems where numbers wrap around after reaching a certain value. It helps solvers decode hidden patterns and solve numerical clues. It sounds easy until you see one of them and you're like, okay,

what do you mean? It wraps around, Like basically, you're solving for this equation, and every time a seven is written out, you start over as far as the linear code is concerned, and you continue working the same math problem, but now everything has new denominations behind it. And then when it hits a seven again, right, then there's prime prime number sequences. Prime numbers numbers only divisible by one

in themselves appeared repeatedly in the puzzles. They were often used to hide messages or form the backbone of certain clues. Then we get to hashes and Base four encode or Base sixty four encoding. Many clues were encoded in Base sixty four, a method of encoding data into text. Others use cryptographic hashes, which are unique strings created to or from input data. May includes harder to reverse engineer without the right key. And that was the bitch of it.

You didn't know if any let's say that this math thing took up like three whole pages. Let's hypothetically you're right now with pen and paper. You wouldn't know if it was wrong until the very end when you tried to go to a certain url and it wasn't there then, and you wouldn't know at what point you fucked up your math. You would have to go back to the beginning, because it's like a one degree difference here might be a four hundred degree difference in an hour. So you

you actually don't know where you're at. So only the people that were like of.

duality and enlightenment. Alistair Crowley's The Book of Law, a cryptic occult text that emphasizes individual will and secret knowledge. The Voynage manuscript and undecipherable medieval codex that appears to inspire Cicada's thirty three zero one's use of obscure symbols. Yes, still to this day that hasn't been decoded, and Liber Primus, the most infamous texts of the Cicada mystery. Written entirely in ruins, it remains largely unsolved, with many pages still untranslated.

Some theorists believe the key to unlock Cicada thirty three oz one's ultimate goal lies in decoding this text, and still like even aside from Cicada thirty three oh one, just linguists have not been able to decode every page of Premium or Liber Primus, which stands for like first.

Some of the pages have been deciphered, and we're going to talk about those more in depth here in a bit. Some of them are from what we can tell, it's not even gibberish. There's obviously some sort of a code being used. We have not cracked it yet, and maybe with the use of AI, maybe someone out there will be able to. But as of time recording, most of Liber Primus is still undecoded.

So it's not like any old person with some advanced AI on their laptop is going to be able to become a member of Cicada. They wanted this to happen before this, and maybe that might have been a part of the problem, because AI that we know today started in what was it twenty ee We talked about this a couple episodes ago, I forget, but they might have seen the writing on the walls and they knew they had to find some of their kind before it got to where everybody could do it.

It's on a light pole in one of these places. But like that might be Paris, Warsaw, Poland. Excuse me, Okay, it looked European, but yeah, yeah, So some of the more known places Seattle, Washington, a poster with a QR code was taped to a lamp post Warsaw, Poland. A similar clue was found on a street sign, which we just had on screen. Soul, South Korea. A message was discovered attached to a telephone pole Sydney, Australia. Another set of coordinates led to a hidden message in the city.

And if you look at these things, this is just paper, like one good rainstorm, this is gone. So time was of the essence like if you're going to be about this life, you better get on a plane. You didn't. Now it was the barrier for entry was going up a level because it wasn't just are you smart enough? Do you have the resources enough to drive or get in a plane to go to one of these GPS locations.

There was fourteen of them around the world. And if you, for instance, were in a country that wouldn't let you leave, then that sucks. You can't be a part of it. Or if you were you know, you know it didn't have the finances. Maybe you were super smart, but you were living under the poverty line and you couldn't afford to rent a car or fly to a certain location. Well, okay, once again, you're you sorry.

mystery yourself, try to try this. Look up the coordinates on Google Maps thirty four degrees forty one forty four north by seventy six degrees forty one twenty one or twenty west. Where do they lead? Imagine finding a hidden message or clue there? I don't know what those coordinates are actually know what let's just I'm just copy and paste that real quick. Good cult members, We're gonna go there.

We are going to go onto Google Maps, and we are going to do that right now, Google Maps up, up, up, and let's type that in and let's just see what happens here and paced. So this was just a random test run here, right. But if they were to tell you to go there and try to find some sort of a thing on a street lamp or whatever, You're going to a beach to find some sort of a

QR code or something. And so when they give you these coordinates, it's very difficult and you have to get there, you have to find whatever clue you're trying to find, plug it in, get back to your home computer that has a tour browser, and all these things. So like time was of the essence, and if you couldn't do it, you couldn't do it. So these physical clues reinforced the idea that Cicada thirty three oh one was more than

just an Internet based challenge. It had real world implications. However, the messages at these locations vanished quickly, building more theories that only a select few ment were meant to find them. So now we get into some of the theories about Cicada. So, despite years of investigation and speculation, no one knows for

sure who created Cicada thirty three ye old one or why. However, several theories have emerged, based on the nature of the puzzles, the skills required to solve them, and the secrecy surrounding the purpose intelligence agency recruitment. That's an option.

These groups have been known to use creative means to identify and recruit top talent, so the idea of a global puzzle as a recruitment tool isn't far fetched. Still, no agency has ever claimed involvement, and I feel like they would have.

the cicada's puzzles. The idea here is that puzzles were used to filter out only the most persistent and skilled candidates, who were then invited to join a secret cybersecurity network. Now that has the way more credence behind that one than the three letter agency thing. However, I don't I could see a possibility. I don't believe that that's the actual reasoning behind it, although we could be wrong. Moving on cybersecurity awareness campaign, I don't believe it, but let's continue.

Some believes c CADA thirty three to oh one had no recruitment goal at all, but was instead meant to raise public awareness about online privacy, encryption, and the importance of protecting digital freedoms. The heavy use of cryptographic tools and open source techniques, along with the inclusion of philosophical messages about liberty and free thought, support this idea. In this case, the puzzles would have been a kind of digital activism or educational project. This is a lot of work.

This is a lot of technical know how, physical locations, sharing things online, going to the dark web. For it to be a cybersecurity awareness campaign.

anything and offered no known reward or conclusion. Still, some believe it was have been purely artistic or intellectual challenges designed for entertainment or a social experiment.

organization operating on the dark web. According to this theory, the puzzles were used to vet individuals for access to hidden networks or illicit operations. While there's no public evidence linking Cicada to any criminal or extremist activity, the group's total anonymity and sudden disappearance after twenty fourteen leave no leave room for this possibility. I think that this is close.

I don't think that this was uh they're trying to find a way to hack the system and steal cryptocurrency, right, Although I have also seen that theory that some believe that Cicada thirty three to oh one was just a way to get the world's best bitcoin minors, And it's like, I don't believe that that's the case. Honestly, I could see why they would make that conclusion, but there's no way I what's.

But there's so many documentaries about Anonymous, and there are so many people that are known affiliates of Anonymous that have left the group that have come forward to talk about their experiences. None of it had to do with Cicada thirty three oh one, so I don't think that's necessarily it either. I don't believe that this has anything to do with some sort of uh making the world a better place thing, although I could see possibly, but it's not like Cicada thirty three oh one's actually doing

the work to fight child trafficking. Like, No, I don't believe that at all either. I believe that this was to how could I put this to the same level that you said of the global elites that are actually running the world that we would never know if we even if we met them or heard their name. I think that this was to do something to that level of dark web activism, something that we would never know.

It's like a James Bond right, whenever he does something to save the world and no one ever knows about it, but he was doing all this wild shit. I think it's like that this group might be out there trying to save the world from god knows what, but the only reason that they are doing it is and being so successful at it, is because we don't know about it. I don't know what's your thoughts as of this moment.

see what makes the brain different from other people? How are these people more intelligent than the normal people? Do tests on them, use whatever, use their blood, use actual like you know, the celluar makeup pretty much, or I can see them using them in the sense of may there's like a I don't know, maybe you're training them for something. Maybe you're utilizing them for something, creating a super weapon, or using them to be able to communicate with somebody else, those along those lines.

Some individuals reported reaching the final stage, allegedly receiving private invitations from Cicada, but no verified proof of what happened afterwards exists. A select group of solvers supposedly completed the puzzles and were asked to participate in a secret project. However, whether this was recruitment, experimentation, or another purpose remains unknown. After twenty fourteen's puzzle, the Cicada thirty three oh one

suddenly stopped posting. In twenty sixteen, a message appeared online warning about unauthorized third party groups falsely claiming to be Cicada thirty three oh one. Whether this message was truly from the original group remains debated. Meanwhile, Liber Primus still contains unsolved passages. Some believe that unlocking its full meaning

could reveal the last piece of the mystery. However, with no new puzzles and no official communication since twenty fourteen, the fate of Cicada thirty three oh one remains uncertain. Unless it resurfaces, the full story behind its elaborate challenges may never be known. So now is the mystery really over? Cicada thirty three oh one is still one one of the biggest Internet mysteries. Was it a way of recruiting topry top cryptographers, a secret cybersecurity project, or someone else.

No one knows for sure. After twenty fourteen. Like I said, it's all it's the biggest mystery. It's the biggest mystery on the Internet. But let's talk about this homeboy right here, the one who actually was the first to solve the first puzzle in twenty twelve. This is from Virginia Tech magazine. Let's get into it here. Codecs are Coder Creator by

Stephen McKay. It was an enigmatic puzzle that only the nimbless intellects would take on a series of highly complicated cryptographic mind benders containing prime numbers, riddles, and treks through assorted fantasy novels, and Virginia Tech's rising sophomore Marcus Weyner, solved it in twenty twelve when he was a homeschooled fifteen year old in Copper Hill, Virginia fifteen. He was fifteen when he solved it in twenty twelve.

seems like that guy. Yeh, let's see. The exercise, which appeared on the underground website four chan, was created by a secret group identified themselves as a Cicada thirty three oh one, claiming to be in search of those skilled at deciphering cryptography the group that the group may have been a loose network of tech savvy free speech activists looking for new members, or perhaps a poll of programmers

just having fun. Now all but silent. The group was not, from all reports, a cooperation of the government or corporation. I should say, as one of only a handful of people in the world who have solved the puzzle, all of whom were subsequently invited to collaborate on an online project related to Internet privacy. Wayner Wanner Don't Know was featured in a story about Cicada thirty three to oh one in an early January edition of Rolling Stone magazine.

So Kata puzzle long behind him and the online project abandoned Wayner, who's majoring in computer science. Shocker held two jobs on campus last year, serving as a computer coder for the university's Learning Enhanced Watershed Assessment System Lab, which monitors nearby Strubbles Creek, and providing high performance computer coding support for genomic researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute or VBI.

So Marcus is a unique student that in that he realizes he is here to learn and not to show off his excellent programming skills, said Zalman Waxman, a postdecorate doctorate excuse me, research fellow at VBI. He is willing to work on projects in areas where he is less comfortable, which is why he wanted to go into bioinformatics, biology and genomics. He already is overcoming this and learning a new problem solving approach, which makes him far more valuable

as a future colleague than others with equivalent skills. So now this is a Q and A with him. Let's hear what he has to say. So, what drew you to Cicada thirty three oh one puzzle? He says, I have friends who enjoy puzzles such as this. I was drawn to thirty three oh one puzzle specifically because it was low level file format and networking stuff, very minimal

and clean from a technical perspective. With most Internet puzzles, if you dig deep enough, you can see some nessy behind the scenes clutter, which really kills the mystery for me. But thirty three oh one managed to avoid any of this as far as I can tell. So for me, it was clear that the person running the puzzle had a very high degree of competence, and I was interested

in being involved with whatever they were recruiting for. Okay, okay, So at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, how is your work and cracking genetic code assisting researchers. He goes into a little bit about the the VBI stuff. We're not really worried about that on this one. So both your employers are dedicated to good causes, curing genetic diseases and tracking water quality. Where you drawn to the cause or the challenges.

He says on one of the reasons I came to Virginia Tech was the opportunity to apply my skills to useful research. While a student, I had no initial interest in water quality or healthcare before I started, But as I worked with people who have a real passion for each subject matter and seeing the real data and its implications, I have become excited about the research. None of us, single handily are going to change the world, but we

are trying to come as close as we can. So he seems like a good kid.

King Arthur's tapestry. This was it's a tapestry. It's a real historical tapestry of King Arthur that they squished together and formed layers of it on top of each other to make an image that you had to decode. That was a part of the twenty twelve releases Agrippa by William Gibson, which is a book code key, and that

was also in twenty twelve. So I don't I'm unfamiliar with the work itself, but if it has anything to do with Cornelius Agrippa, this goes into the esoteric, which would make sense based off of all the other things we read. Here mebin Gayon Mabinajian, which is by Charlotte Guest, is a book code text. You had to go get this book and use the code to decipher what the actual message was this page, this paragraph, this sentence, this word,

all the things. Next was the Encyclopedia Britannica. You had to you had to go into that good bit here a Song of Liberty by William Blake that you had to go to Bartleby for that one. And that was also a thing too. They were getting sent to them bits of sound bites songs that you would have and they didn't sound. Some of them sounded weird, some of them sounded kind of you know, synthesis levels of of

whatever kind of technoy. But you had to take these and break down the sound bites, to look at the numbers designation on them, and then put those into a binary code system to get a message out of it. Okay, it's it's sane.

were from William Blake, by the way. Next twenty thirteen, we start off with Alistair Crowley. Next, the New Inquisition by Robert Anton Wilson, Self Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and that started the twenty fourteen releases. So for twenty thirteen you only had these two releases, one from Crowley and one from Wilson, and so there was other things. There was other online things, but as far as the book sources go, this was it. So

for twenty fourteen, Self Reliance and Other Essays. Portrait of Andreas del Peril, which is from Goya. Ecent's not sure and it was from the National Gallery, so it's an art piece. Image of Grigory resputant. In twenty fourteen, you had to use that one trio Trio Sonata in G Major, which is from Bach. You had to go and listen to this to find source codes from it to use to make a codex, which I love that they used Bach because Bach has always had a mathematical quality to it,

or at least I've always felt so. And two years ago and I was speaking to an opera singer about it. It's very rare that I get to actually like chop it up on some nerd levels about classic music, and he agreed that like Bach was mathematic everything was done that way on purpose, because he gave a structure. His actual quote, I love this into death. He's a member of the Christian nonprophlem a part of he said back.

Gave us structure so that Mozart could give us fire. Okay, And so looking at the Trio Sonado and g major Bock's mathematical principles that he applied to his music, you were supposed to take this in twenty fourteen and extrapolate numbers that you would then put into some sort of a source code binary hexadecimal. Who knows to get out a message that would lead you to another clue.

there's also jamatria. Let's see it going down here. There's JPEGs that are used, hex dumps, which is within the hexodesmer Caesar ciphers, URLs, outguest PGPs, mayan numerals book code UTC, which is coordinated Universal Time QR codes that were used the tour Network or dot Onion sites RSA. That's the

second chance part. In the second chance part aka Amdi puzzle was mi id i midi perl in the RSA message xo R, which is used a lot throughout the twenty thirteen puzzle Jamatria converting words into numbers and vice versa. There was a lot of mostly blank and outguests. Telenet, which was an Internet protocol used in twenty thirteen puzzles to communicate with websites without the web browse sure Schmir's secret sharing scheme. This is used in a twenty thirteen puzzle.

In the phone call part, you would receive a phone call. You had to like actually get a there was a telephone number that you would get. You had to call and they would there was a message that you would get that you were supposed to take as the source for your next clue. Yeah.

personal experience and stuff like that. So it's it's interesting, and even in some of the stuff that they wrote, when I was looking at different passages that they wrote into this, it was a lot to do with personal like how people are in and of itself, are they good?

So is it that they were trying to force these people into esoteric and gnostic works to try to get it or were they trying to test to see if these people were willing to do whatever it took. Were these people that were willing to question certain narratives or wouldn't get offended by reading Crowley's works and things like this, right, All these are ways of filtering out the ones that they didn't want. Possibly it was to get them to read into these things. And perhaps there was some dark

occult symbolism behind it. Maybe it was just the same, Maybe it could have been any innocuous symbol, but they chose to make it more of the dark and ominous for that purpose. Like I don't know, but to.

different vibrations. I know I heard it somewhere, but I would have to look into it more.

encode unprintable bytes into printable characters. Visionaire, we talked about that code that they were using to decode certain things in Graham. This was used in the third Onion in

twenty fourteen puzzle. Column transposition cipher used in the third Onion at bash was used in the second Onion totient function mentioned in the Third Onion twenty fourteen puzzle and used to decrypt the final page of LP or Liber primusob which is out of band data and then hash a hash function in any function that can be used to map data or arbitrary sized to fixed sized values. So again they he kind of went all over the

place on this. They were using literary sources, they were using technological sources, they were using ancient coded text and things that you would have to use, a Caesar cipher, a Visioneer cipher, whatever the case. And of course they use a couple of different websites four Chan, Reddit, mitke server, Twitter, minger or iminger infotoom paste bin and uh yeah this was wild things from twenty twelve to twenty fourteen and still no real answers, right, So.

and associated messages. So puzzle number one, the first Cicada thirty three oh one puzzle, was posted on four Chan January twenty twelve, involved an image that contained a message hidden using steganography. The message led to a book code that, when applied to the book liber alvel Ligis by Alistair Crowley, produced a message that directed the solver to an onion website containing another message right. The solution the image used in the puzzle containing a hidden message in the form

of a string of characters. This message, when decrypted using a steganography tool called Outguests, produced a link to a subreddit containing a series of encrypted messages. Using the key ao clock, the messages were decrypted and compiled into a book code. The book code pointed to a specific page, line and word in a book of law from Crowley that revealed a message call us.

The message was a book code that pointed to a specific page and line in a book which we talked about Alistair Crowley that revealed the message call us at telephone number two one four three nine zero nine six zero eight. Yeah, they gave actual phone number on this one. When called, the number played a pre recorded message of a robotic voice reading out a series of letters and numbers. The message call us at telephone number a bop was the solution to the second Cicada thirty three oh one puzzle,

so with that. The third Cicada thirty three oh one puzzle was posted in twenty fourteen and involved the Cicada thirty three oh one Twitter account that posted an image containing a message hidden using stecnography. Again, the message directed the solver to a tour website containing another message that led to a series of quizzes on obscure topics. The full solution to this puzzle has not been made public.

They sent a test like a personality quiz yeah in puzzle number three, and you could only find it if you went to the dark web and knew where to look. So the solution, like we said or we read that one already. The message hidden in the Twitter image directed of the sovereign to a tour website with another message. But the full solution has never been made public. And

that's the thing. You would get sent something basically saying congratulation you passed the test, or thank you for your submission, will let you know something soon, essentially, right, ok So puzzle number four, the fourth Cicada thirty three oh one

puzzle was posted in twenty sixteen. Allegedly they stopped in twenty fourteen, but this is when that twenty sixteen happened, right, And involved a music file that contained spectagram a spectrogram rather that when decoded, produced a message that led to a website containing a message written in ruins. The music file contained a spectrogram that which we talked about that basically when decoded using a spectrogram reading tool produce an

image with the word Tiberius Claudius Caesar. Would we would know who that is?

Caesar cipher in order to break that code. The Fort Cicada thirty three oh one puzzle was posted on Twitter and twenty fourteen involved a music file named four thirty three four Apostrophe thirty three Quotations by John Cage, which is a piece of music that consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of listening or excuse me, four

minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. However, upon analyzing the spectrogram in the music file, a message could be decoded using a technique called steganography, which involves hiding messages within other data.

by the Germanic and Nordic people. The Runic message translates into English reads beware of false paths, always speak truth and do not fear, for it is time for you to seek the ultimate truth. And it repeats that three times.

a lot of attention on various Internet forums. As it turns out, I was one of the few that were working solo on solving it. Most of the people that eventually got far were working in teams with groups of people. But for me, the whole point was to try to solve it myself. I've always enjoyed a challenge. In twenty twenty one, the story of Cicada thirty three oh one was even turned into a movie, and I can either confirm or deny that this is roughly how it all

went down. So apparently there's a movie on thirty three ZHO one which I find fascinating. Yeah. Actually a matter of fact, we might be able to play a little sex segment of it.

we advise a test. There's a message hidden in this image. Find it and it will lead you down a road to find us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good Luck thirty three oh one. And then he saw about His first thought was that it was to use steganography to hide a message, and since it was a JPEG image, I tried using Steg detect excuse me by Neil's provos

in case one of the detectable schemes was used. Since Steg detect have not been updated in almost seven years, I didn't really get my hopes up that high, but it was always worth a shot. The results can be seen below, and that's when they saw the Tiberius Claudus. Okay, right, I didn't detect any common s technography schemes, but notified

me of sixty one appended bites of ACESCII text. Since my move would have been to use strings, I would have discovered this anyway, but Steg detect was kind enough to tell me directly instead. So let's see what we have. Tiberius Claudius Caesar. This quote obviously a shift of cipher of some sort, also known as a Caesar cipher, with lxxt greater than thirty three being ciphered version of the HTTP colon slash slash. I didn't know that it is again,

but that's again. This is it. So this is the ciphered version of the HTTP thing that we have on every website ever. Thirty three No, no, no, lxxt greater than thirty three. So the slash slash is thirty three. Apparently I didn't know that, but.

see in the shift value. In this particular case, this might have been a bit overkilled, since we could have just as well manually counted the distance between H and I and the alphabet or H and L. I should say it is probably not a coincidence that Claudius happens to be the fourth emperor of the Roman Empire and the shift value happens to be four, So fair enough to decipher this A pearl on a pearl one line is enough. So then we have this image right, which

we talked about already. It seems the image you are el commut. Okay, it seems like the challenge is a bit harder than a Caesar cipher after all. Note that the message contains the word out and guess, though, which could be a hint that we are actually supposed to use an old outguess tool to extract the hidden message. Incidentally, outguess is also developed by Neil's Provos and is available

for download from the same site as steg Detect. Unfortunately, it seems like stag detect is the only able to detect when the older out guests has been used and not out guests point one three instead of out Guess point two. Again, they're getting into things that I know nothing about. Using out guests point two with the minus R option immediately reveals a hidden message in the original image.

So they have these bytes, they have these numbers, but it's Outguess thirty three oh one jpeg and thirty three oh one text. So there's a hidden message that can be found. Is this a hyperlink? Let's see, let's go to the hyperlink. So this is the book code. This was the actual message, and at the bottom says here's the book code. To find the book and more information, go to a reddit website. And then this was the book code, and at the bottom it says, good luck thirty three oh one.

do not despair. There will be more opportunities like this one. Thank you all thirty three oh one ps. And he gave a long list of numbers and slashes and things and stuff, so you were supposed to just take that no to you know, find the message. Yep, that's the thing anyway. The hidden message also includes a so called book codes consisting consisting of a number of lines with two digits separated by a colon on each, and we

talked about that already. Some of the book ciphers here, So when visiting the Reddit page we can make a number of observations. Most notably, there are a number of posts by the pseudonym cage throttle us that seems to consist of encoded text, which we can assume to be the book. It looks like an ordinary Caesar sipher may have been used, but on a closer look, no shift values results in readable text. It seems most likely that a key of some sort is required to decode the text.

Looking closer at the page, we can also see that the title is It's a lot of letters and numbers. The uur self is truncated version of this to the right below subscribe button, the title text is repeated and verify seven A thirty five, zero, nine zero F is written underneath. We can also see pictures of some Mayan numbers on the top of the page. Mayan numbers are quite logical, at least from zero to nineteen, A dot

equals one and a vertical line equals five. Two lines thus equals ten one line with two dots equals seven, five and two cool so on. And if you've ever seen Mayan numbers, it looks it's just dashes with some dots on top. But for the Mayans this was their mathematical numerology, which is great. There's also a symbol resembling a rugby ball that equals zero, so they had that too. They understood the concept of zero. So many people are like man, the Greeks are the first to even think

of what zero meant. Ancient Maya already knew that zero meant no value. It was like a placeholder kind of thing. The number sequence using written using the Maya numbers is as follows ten two, fourteen, seven nineteen six eighteen twelve seven eight seventeen zero nineteen. Now, comparing this with the long thing in the title, we can see that the number below ten in the sequence above is also found in this string at the same positions.

It may refer to any number of things. A PGB key ID, however, a good assumption, since it consists of thirty two bit value normally encoded as eight hex characters, and since PGP keys can be used to verify the signature and thus the authenticity of messages signed with a PGP key, this could quite This could be quite handy in case the challenges go on, and in case people decide to drop false leads to people working on it. So it's a it's an article where he basically breaks

it all the way down. But you see the level of intellect. Yes, it's yeah.

from the word daggers that's also used. Another thing in common for these particular lines of texts that they include a period somewhere before the character that has been decoded incorrectly. If we assume that periods, which in sentences should count as two characters instead of one. When applying it to the book code, we get this, which looks a bit neater, and it shows uh, call us at the telephone number two one four, three nine nine six eight. So that's low key.

have to find the other two. Multiply all three of these numbers together and add a dot com to find the next step. Good luck and goodbye. So this is where they actually went and found the pixels, because they just said that thirty three oh one was one of them. And if you look at it, five oh three and five oh nine, if you realize, if you looked at it, it's not a perfect square. It was almost a perfect square.

So when you took the number of pixels on the width and the length of this thirty three oh one times five oh three times five oh nine, you would get this number eight four five one four five one two seven. Okay. And when looking at the metadata for the original image that was noted, when you would type that in as a dot com, it would send you to another website and then you would have to use that it would show the Cicada countdown.

different experience. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next. When the countdown was finished at seventeen hundred UTC January ninth, twenty twelve, it was replaced by a string of digits resembling GPS coordinates. This is whenever we got to the real world applications, and there was some fourteen places around the world where you had to go and find those QR codes. So again this is from a person who actually did the work and went there and did all

these things right. They both also included a twenty two line book code. Both of them included text the product of the first two primes at line three and fifteen, and one of them also included the text the first prime at line eight. This probably means that the characters on these positions should be replaced with the numbers described. Note that the definition of a prime number is a natural number greater than one with no positive divisors other

than one itself and itself. This means that the first two prime numbers are two and three.

poem by William Gibson is among the first hints. The poem is called Agrippa or a book of the Dead, and according to the Wikipedia, its principal notoriety arose from the fact that the poem, stored on a three point five inch floppy disc, was programmed to erase itself after a single use. Similarly, the pages of the artist's book were treated with photosensitive chemicals, affecting the gradual fading of the words and images from the book's first exposure to light.

This fits the description perfectly.

But moving on, it says, judging by the dot onion at the end of the string, this is actually an anonymous hidden service on the tour network. Unfortunately, by the time I arrived with the stage, the tour service was not available anymore. Thirty three oh one, it concluded the last couple of messages with you've shared too much at this point. We want the best, not the followers. Thus

the first few there will receive the prize. So it was probably the first, come, first serve the ones who are lucky enough to arrive in time, most of which did not solve much or any of this challenge themselves. Since people were sharing their solutions, got to enter their email addresses and were informed that they would be contact within a few days. But so Agrippa wasn't even the point, right the book itself, the Book of the Dead, none

of that was the point. All of it was to lead you to a tour browser that after so many visits was shut down.

So they talking about how they've been talking about this on a couple of them. But this is where we get into these. This is Premier Leabis and it all looks like, you know, there's these women on either side of it. These are the text lines anyway, and the red part is supposed to be very important. Right now, I've recently started appreciating the Foremost as a tool over ben Walk recently, so we have to we can ask Foremost to exact extract Jesus these four images. I am

messing up my reading right now. Now it appears we have four more pages of leave a Premus book extracted. Unless you can read runs, you're not gonna know what to do with this.

hidden service here work alone. Good luck thirty three oh one, and so these were this was the message that was sent out to them. So before we go refresh on our magic squares from the previous puzzles, we should go figure out what these four pages of the books say. We have quite a collection of scripts to run on runs now, so we will try each of the following and look for successful decoding. Direct translation, reverse translation xor with puzzle to brute force visionaire key and brute force

column key. As we go down the list, it doesn't take long as this is a direct translation of rooms to English, which I'm gonna be honest with you, I didn't know this. These right here is basically the loss of divinity. That's what these rooms say. I would never know that. I don't speak the language. But as you can see, a direct translation started spelling out the loss of divinity. Now we have to remind ourselves of what this translation looks. That this why this looks a bit

odd the lack of a better words. Lightning bolt Roun has either a S or Z as a value letter value. The letter V has no corresponding rune. So we have to kind of infer some things throughout. Do not edit or change this book or the message contained within either the words or their numbers, for all is sacred. So as we go forward, we probably have to treat the message exactly as they are decoded, even if it doesn't

look exactly like perfect English. As you continue going through these four pages are they all are a simple direct translation which ends up forming this story titled The Loss of Divinity, which we will correct into proper spelling for the sake of reading it. Now. Remember we don't have a letter V in the translation, so the proper spelling would be do we unity, which may or may not be become relevant. Don't really know that at the time,

which also I find interesting. In Old English to modern English, the U and the V were used interchangeably as a matter of fact, which like, there's a reason why W as a word even though it's written out as a double V. And in other languages, like in French, it's dubleva, which is V. It's double V, that's how they call it. But in the English language we call it double U

even though there's not us in it. S's and f's were also kind of interchanged weirdly and wildly at the turn of the sixteen hundreds and things like this, So I mean it's there's there's some sort of precedence to that.

Website had a few instructions attached. Please paste the magic squares into the appropriate text areas below, then provide the URL to your tour hidden service. The path to your CGI script will which accepts uploads should be cgi bin upload, and the HTML from input which accepts file uploads should be named file. Additionally, please generate a g n upg key pair and place the public key in the local location key acs. Okay, so now we get into the

new numbers of it. So as as much as the book was to tell us about the squares, it actually leads more towards thirty three oh one, it doesn't actually have to do what the information contained within the books. So we have to generate three different magic squares with the values ten, thirty three twice and thirty three oh one at either a seven x seven or five y five grid. Thankfully I recently bloged about the magic squares

in our previous works. So bye ba bab. We have to host and build a tour website and this is what comes up. So the question is whether we have to painfully generate these or discover them with them previous puzzles. We know way back in part two, we found a magic square that was utilized for decoding a page. Right, this is a perfectly valid magic square that sums to eleven oh three on every row column diagonalm so I'm leaning toward going back through all media assets from the

previous puzzles to discover more squares. Thankfully, within a few weeks between blog posts a bit of renewed energy to try and again, and it didn't take long. I just popped the image into a forensic beta and message with a JPEG error correction scale. Once I started seeing the Cicada logo on Personal and Person, Rasputant comes into focus. I just messed with the sliders and the numbers appeared.

So this is the image. So once you did all these things, you went to Premier Libis, you got these numbers, you made the magic squares, and you made a tore browser. This image would come up and you had to mess with the color schemes, you had to mess with the brightness and all this an image of Rasputant Cicada and these numbers showed up. So again I don't I don't think it actually had to do with Premier Lebis. I

don't think it actually had to do with Crowley. I don't think it actually had to do with Gibson, although it might everything is connected. I think that that was more of a stepping stone to get you to the next spot. I could be wrong, but this is a more zoomed in image of it, and it's I mean, I wouldn't even think to do this if I been given this image, I'm not gonna start messing with the sliders to find brightness and contrast to get these things.

We know we already have a five y five square that sums two ten thirty three, and the left column could be a single column or row of the seven x seven square, and likewise, the right column sums two thirty three oh one and could represent the five by five magic square that psalms thirty three oh one. But anyway, continuing on here, so if we look back at the end at all the assets from the puzzle, we had

an image of Godell's incompetentness theorem or incompleteness theorem. An I mc esher a three second audio clip of Box Trio Sonata, the photo above, and an MP three song Interconnectedness, which you could still find online right now Interconnectedness by thirty three oh one. So the first three assets are so tiny, and we already packed in an image, so there was probably not much luck of finding some hidden

magic squares within those. We've already ripped apart the photo above, So I believe the missing is something in the audio file, which a lot of people agreed with that. By the way, with the initial release date included, I tossed out any tool that was built after the third puzzle was release East January twenty fourteen, and it wouldn't make sense to use a stenograph scenography tool that didn't exist at the time of the Cicada puzzles. I'll attempt to use this

latest version. So basically, this dude is documenting his walk in trying to figure all this shit out. There we go. This is a clip of the audio file itself. I want to say, if I coul zoom in and read what the hell that says? One secret found or yeah, okay, secret found on word ABCD that was That was the clue, and he had to use all these tools within the audio files to find that this message that's this is I.

messenger code hidden within the spectagram waveform analysis. I was looking for anomalies in the waveform that might suggest some data within success thrives in the world of Sonic Visualizer, when you have an original audio file and one you think is modified to compare against this song produced by Cicada, As far as I can tell, as an original creation,

we have nothing to compare it against. The more I researched the audio via Sonic, the more I realized that Kada thirty three to oh one would not have made something so easy to spot in a tool. So Kata puzzles are resistant to brute forcing generally, so my guess, if anything is packed in this file, we haven't found it.

This tool Sonic has gone through nearly twenty versions since twenty thirteen, but I'm under the belief the tools visualizing data have only improved, so I'll ignored the older versions and just move on, all right, So continue on. We're skipping way ahead in this because my god, he's talking about things that I feel like most people have no

idea what it's about. So anyway, so I decided to try again using an older version of open Puff version four point zero and run through my possible passwords again. To my surprise, I hit thirty three oh one one zero three three with a fifty percent bit selection and saw a different message than ever before. I couldn't believe the password was in front of my face the entire time. As I hit okay, another dialogue popped up with the

details on what it discovered. Hidden file name magic square text or it says beginner report hidden file magic square dot text. Bite size is seven hundred and forty five bytes. I don't know what that letter's supposed to be into report. Success was finally here a hidden file called magic square dot text was hidden within the interconnected MP three. So hidden within that song when you knew what to plug up and want to look into it, here a text

box was able to be extrapolated Magic squares. I don't even know, like what to make of that. You're muted. I was like, you're muted at this moment.

file locators. This is what they were communicating like carefully, the magic squares were pasted into their respective box in the URL to create the onion was added and submit was clicked. Instead of the generic unsuccessful page, we were presented with a simple response page with three more book pages. It's that's what I'm saying. It's it's it's more of the premier lebas And you have to use this to go back and do all this again to find more info,

to find more intel and all these things. This whole page right, and then these numbers at the bottom. I ran each stream through a basic Translate reverse and surprising, the last page decoded successfully. I see and instruction.

will arrive outside the lice that interstar. It is only through going with in that we may emerge in wisdom.

of the liber Primus, off of this other thing. It all it's just one thing after another after another after another. So we're scrolling all the way down here because the dude goes way more in depth with it, and he used so many different keys to decode this. So right here we have a chart the original the original runic character, the original runic character index of what the numbers were

supposed to mean. Then when you plug that into a visionaire key, uh gomatria primus visionaire index, a shifted runic sequence, and then the shifted runic character. And that's how he was able to decode and decipher all of this shit, which then led him back to the book and there was more things, and it's let's see if they're going to break this down. So a Cohen during so with a bit of cleanup I could clean up the entire three pages into one solid story long way he got here,

but this, let's just get here a cone. During a lesson, the master explained the I. The I is the voice of the circumference, he said. When asked by a student to explain what he meant, the master said, it is a voice inside your head. I don't have a voice in my head, thought the student, and he raised his hand to tell the master. The master stopped the student and said, the voice that just said that you don't have a voice in your head is the eye. And

the students were enlightened an instruction question all things. Discover the truth inside yourself, follow the truth, impose nothing on others. Know this and the number sequence. So that was the entire thing from this, and he goes more in depth with a lot of it. But yeah, this dude put in the legwork to find the answer to these puzzles.

they're trying to say here, honestly. But there's more. There's these pages and pages and pages, and there's a cicada at the bottom of this one. Right then you have these Some letters are read, that's very significant, some are not. Some have the women standing on the side of them, some just have the little fancy swirlly marks. But this is the entirety of the Premier or liber Primus book. These dots, I feel like those dots are also significant.

got read an infinity symbol. Again, good cult members, If you're not seeing this on your screen right now, you really do need a condopatreon dot com slash CULTU conspiracy podcast to see what the hell we are talking about on this anyway, moving on, moving on, I just wanted to show that, yes, liber Primus is still a thing that you can go to right now. You can still search it up and if you can read runes then

by all means get after it homing. But even those that can read Nordic runs, they're saying that this isn't an indelible sentence. This is a code. There's ciphers, there's ways that it's written that don't make sense in regular speech pattern, and it's done that way specifically apparently. Now I don't know if Cicada made this, or if this is some sort of an old text that dates way way way back and then Cicada is using it for

this purpose or what. I don't know, But I mean, at this point, anybody's guess is as good as anybody else is here. So this is uh, the leber Primus on is uncovering Cicada dot fandom. This is what you were talking about believe nothing from this book.

and suffering, your innocence, your illusions, your certainty, and your reality. Ultimately, you will discover an end to self. And it's through this pilgrimage that we shape ourselves and our realities. Journey deep within and you will arrive outside like the in star. It is only through going within that we may emerge wisdom. You are a being unto yourself. You are a law unto yourself. Each intelligence is holy, for all that lives is holy, an instruction command for your own self some wisdom.

The primes are sacred, the tocient function is sacred. All things should be encrypted. Know this, and then that's the number sequence right there, right, And we already talked about a cohen A man decided to go on to study with a master. We read that one already. Let's see. The man thought for a moment, replied, oh wait.

You know what I'm talking about.

wishes to study here? The man was getting irritated. I am, he stated, but he could not think of anything else to say, so he trailed off. After a long pause, the master applied, then you are welcome to come study an instruction. Do four unreasonable things each day? So wait, wait, so he's basically saying I am, and then just didn't say anything after that, and he's like, then you are welcome to study. Okay, So do four unreasonable things each

day the loss of divinity. The circumference practices three behave which cause the loss of divinity. Consumption. We consume too much because we believe the following two errors within the deception. Number one, we do not have enough or there is not enough, or number two we have what we have now by luck, and we will not be strong enough later to obtain what we need. Most things are not worth consuming. Preservation. We preserve things because we believe we

are weak. If we lose them, we will not be strong enough to gain them. Again. This is the deception. Most things are not worth preserving. Most things are not worth preserving. Adherents we follow dogma so that we can belong, to belong and be right, or we follow reasons so we can belong and be right. There is nothing to be right about. To belong is death. It is the behaviors of consumption, preservation, and adherence that we have us that have us lost, that have us lose our primality

and thus our divinity. Some wisdom a mass great wealth. Never become attached to what you own. Be prepared to destroy all that you own. An instruction program, your mind program reality a cone. During a lesson, the master explained, this is the voice and the circumference. The master stopped and the students were enlightened. Question all things to discover your truth. Know this. We talked about the numbers on that already an end. Within the deep web, there exists

a page that hashes tolah blah. There's a lot of code there. It is the duty of every pilgrim to seek out this page. Parable like the instar tunneling through the surface, we must shed our circumferences, find the divinity within and emerge.

they started talking. When that first image appeared on four Chan looking for highly intelligent individuals, the chase was on. The mysterious group known as thirty three oh one presented clues and challenges that thousands of techies and puzzle solvers found impossible to resist. Each mystery became more complex. The clues that connected Julius Caesar and King Arthur to cryptography were genius and easy enough to solve that people became hooked.

The solutions that led to phone numbers and geographic coordinates made the search even more real. But over time it became clear that thirty three oh one was looking for a specific type of person. To solve Cicada, you needed knowledge of the concepts and the tools used in encryption. You had to have computer skills, understand operating systems, and be handy with programming. It also didn't hurt if you had expertise in may numerology and pre Christian literature. Yeah,

who doesn't, But who was Cicada. A popular theory was that this was a recruiting effort for a government intelligence agency like CIA, NSA or MI six, and there was plenty of precedent for that. During the Second World War, the top secret Government Code and Cipher School used cross exsword puzzles printed in the Daily Telegraph to identify good candidates for Bletchley Park. Those recruits, along with Alan Turing, went on to solve the Enigma machine, which helped the

Allies win the war. NSA and CIA ran similar contests over the years. Companies like Google and Microsoft have also used cryptography and puzzles to recruit, but one of the early winners said Cicada was none of these. After solving the final round of puzzles in twenty thirteen, he received an email with a username and password, along with a site address on the dark Web. The site had two parts,

a message board and a chat room. The message board had various topics, including a welcome section, and an area for Cicada's goals and current projects. The chatroom had about twenty members. According to a couple of the winners, Cicada wanted to further the use of cryptography so more people would have access to Internet privacy. Section and an area for Cicada's goals and current projects. The chatroom had about

twenty members. According to a couple of the winners, Cicada wanted to further the use of cryptography so more people would have access to Internet privacy. Cicada had some big goals, but in the short term, they wanted to recruit highly technical people to develop open source cryptography software. All I had to fight people to write free software yep, and I think this was Cickada's big mistake. The recruits didn't want to write software that wanted to solve puzzles, and

when the puzzles stopped, the membership dwindled. There were spikes in membership when new challenges appeared, but it was the same story. The winners weren't interested in writing software, they weren't driven by ideology, they didn't care about politics. They just wanted to solve puzzles. The same thing happens when NSACIAGHQ and other intelligence organizations do recruitment drives. Many of the winners are offered positions in one of these agencies,

and many of them refuse. They don't want to work in government and it too smart to wake and government. Well, that might be part of it, but really they just want to solve puzzles. Whenever you achieve a task, your brain rewards you with a hit of dopamin. This could mean finishing a workout, completing a school project, or figuring out an escape room. Achieve a goal gets some dopamin. Our brains love dopamin. It turns out that solving problems is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, source

of dopamin for the brain. Solving puzzles like those presented by Cicada reward us with dopaman while we're working on them, and when we actually solve one, well, Cicada solvers describe that feeling is nothing less than exhilarating. Now, plenty of people are interested in politics and ideology, but not too many of them would describe their interest as exhilarating. Puzzles make us happy. When was the last time politics made you happy? And although two of the goals of this

channel are to educate and inspire. The primary goal is to entertain. In other words, the WI Files is here to make you happy. So that's why I've included a Cicada type puzzle in this video. Think you can find it.

But again, if they got to the end of the yellow brick road and discovered that all it was was a group that was writing code to make Internet more accessible to everybody, I could understand why a lot of them be like, Yeah, I didn't put in all this work and all this extra thinking to write code for some group of people I'm never gonna meet and never gonna make money from, So like thanks, but no thanks. I could imagine that too.

So thirty three oh one is actually the angel number, which I thought was kind of interesting.

it restarting stuff over good and evil, enlightenment. And so I'm like, okay, well that's kind of weird. So thirty three one equal seven, which is introspection, spirituality, and analytical thinking. Now I'm not Jonathan, so I don't know the woouness of all the numerology, but I felt like it was something worth actually saying, because it all seems to add into this compounding, massive thing that they built.

vigilantes in some way. Yeah, I think it, or believe nothing in the book finds your truth, experience your death. I feel like when they're talking about this, they're talking about the dark web in and of itself, and that you're gonna find all of what you don't want to see, like if they are this smart and it is a vigilante cyber hacking group that is like actually fighting the true evil like the the elites, the elite elite, and find out really what they are, really what's been happening

for centuries and all of this stuff. I think that plays into this is your enlightenment. You're becoming more enlightened of what's actually around you.

my two random, weird theories. But I feel like if you look at it all of it, it.

dark web for any fucking thing right now. I'm not saying everybody who's on the dark web or evil. Well, again, if you're hacking, you're probably not doing it for good purposes.

I'm going to go help people instead. You see what I'm saying, Like he had all that capability to work with Cicada to be a part of the click, and he decided, Nah, dude, I'm going to go try to help the earth and help you know, the human genome in totality instead. I'm good, But That's what I'm saying. And then also that everything had to be secret in nature. Most very positive things are not secret in nature, right.

dark elites. They were claiming that it was for good purposes, but you wouldn't know any different until you got your welcome letter and then realize all the projects that they're associated with, and then you realize like, oh oh, it's like it's like that scene like Hans, are we the Baddies? I think that might have been what this was.

dot dot dot, And like here you go. One of these sides operates in the darkness and they're talking about revealing the light to you, and the other side talks about how, no, no, here's the light. You could just take it. You see what I'm saying.

it because now they're in the click. So it's like where they disappeared, or they disappeared that all of this could be true. Hell, this could be the fucking Aliens for all we know. Real shit, it could be.

This is a subgroup that has been around fighting the dark Elites or fighting the darkness of some type, and that they have now utilized this to find new recruits to add in their fold to try and combat this on the digital scale. I didn't that was my initial thoughts that I was thinking maybe aliens. I was thinking different, just a whole bunch of different things.

is nothing to tie this ransomware group to that phenomena. Okay, so it appears to be a traditional ransomware as a service group that offers a platform for double extortion with both a ransomware and a data league site to its affiliates. The first published leak on the group's data leak site is dated to June twenty fifth, twenty twenty four. Four days later, on June twenty nine, the group published an invitation to potential affiliates to join their ransomware as a

service platform on the cybercrime forum ramp okay. As as advertised above, the Cicada group uses a ransomware written in Rust for both Windows and Linux hosts. This report will focus on the x ex eesxi Excuse Me ransomware. There are artifacts in the code that suggest that the Windows ransomware is the same ransomware, just as a different compilation.

While more and more ransomware groups are adding the es XI ransomware to their arsenal, only a few groups are known to have used the es XI written in Rust. One of them is a now defunct black Cat alf V ransomware as a service group. Analysis of the code has also shown several similarities to the code to the ALFV set.

down the they're trying to hunt this group down and try to basically not get hacked and get involved.

Was it from the Aliens? We don't know. Was it from the Freemasons? We don't know. But they finally found whatever recruiting number they were looking for, because after three rounds of it, they finally sectioned it off and closed it down for good. What do you make of this? Where is it going? What is the overarching themes? What was their goal? The world may actually never know. I

don't know. I do like how I do like how there's so much speculation, and how you and I were able to pull from this and come up with our own theories on this, and there's no right or wrong. There's no way of knowing.

people is utilized in the dark web. There's a lot of people that understand how to because that's where all the platforms are to break things down and to talk about all this stuff is through that your average Joe or even the people that are looking around, they're they're not going to just be on the web and just some random thing.

on secrecy. Secrecy. God, I'm having issues speaking and the occult and knowledge self enlightenment, enlightenment and totality, and then also a serious understanding of technical know how to be able to extrapolate all of these things. I don't know who they were hunting.

dot com. When you fill out your information, our homeboy, Wayne Clark would be the one to reach out to you and get you squared away, especially as we're talking about how much this is a part of the system we do know that the financial system is not gonna last forever. Silver and gold will have a value regardless of what the financial system is doing. To get your hands on some now while it's still affordable, go to cocsilver dot com. When we started this affiliate program with them,

gold was over three thousand dollars an ounce. It's still way up there. Silver was a little over thirty dollars an ounce. It's currently over eighty five dollars an ounce. That was about a year ago, and it's already gone over double its initial value. It's still affordable. You can still get you some best place cocsilver dot com link in the description below. But good cult members, as we are wrapping up this episode about Cicada thirty three to oh one, we want to hear what you think about it?

Have you ever done research into it? Do you know anybody that was trying to break down these puzzles when they were popping off? Were you one of them? We want to hear from you. What do you think about it? And the best place to let us know would be too please hit the five stars at the Shares of Lice. Suscribes im pleave a poster reviews shares the Prince of vill ask where here's the deal? Mess up my words?

It's all good. The more activity the algorithm seas across all of our listening platforms, the more we get promoted and more potential listeners who could then become potential Coat members. Actor Steve finally as and gentlemen, why are you ready to go check out Menimistics Jonthon show and give him the same love and respect over there with the five

star views and the positivity in the comments. Come check out the Cajun Knights and come join each of us for our individual Patreon lies we host every Wednesday night at nine pm Central. Links to those are in the description as well. And we thank you for everybody's already gone and done so. And with all of this being said, this was another beautiful episode of the Cult of Conspiracy. And I'm the Cajun Knight. And there's one very important,

extremely vital piece of information. We need you the letter just as soon as humanly possible.