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But to find the cypher he needed to find the key first, which he gleaned from translating the Mayan numerals.
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This text was the “book” the book code could be used to decode. Eriksson noticed that several posts by a user using a pseudonym seemed to consist of encoded text. The book code led to a Reddit URL with Mayan numerals on the top of the page.
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Here, he used steganography tools to reveal a hidden book code of a list of two numbers separated by a colon. Once he decoded the cypher, it revealed a URL where another image of a duck was posted.
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To understand how hard Cicada is, one only needs to look at the complexity of each clue that leads to successive parts of the puzzle–all which need to be completed in order to solve the Cicada mystery.įrom the first image that was posted, Eriksson used steganography software to extract a message encoded with a shift cipher, where each letter of the text actually corresponds to another letter. The quest would ultimately return to the deepest layers of the digital world: the dark web. As he worked his way from solving one piece of the puzzle to the next, the journey would lead him to discover that the answers lay not just in the digital domain, but in the real world: From clues left on the voicemail of a Texas telephone number to flyers taped to telephone poles in 14 cities around the world. Tackling the puzzle would lead Eriksson to rely on a host of skills from steganography to cryptography, to an understanding of ancient Mayan numerology and a familiarity with cyberpunk speculative fiction. In the case of Cicada, the puzzle in question turned out to be a lot more than I thought it would be when I started it.” I’ve always been interested in anything that can challenge me, and I never give up. “Initially, I just thought it would be a nice little brainteaser. “Unfortunately, I didn’t see it until some time after it was originally posted, and thus had some catching up to do,” Eriksson says. “I stumbled upon it on one of the image boards the first image was posted to in 2012,” says Eriksson, a 34-year-old cryptosecurity researcher and developer from Sweden. Joel Eriksson is one of the few known people to have actually solved it since the first challenge appeared online.