Can you solve the Cicada 3301 internet mystery? In January 2012, a message appeared on 4chan. White text on a black screen: "Hello. We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. Good luck. 3301." What followed was the most elaborate puzzle the internet has ever seen. It spanned cryptography, steganography, original music, a bootable Linux operating system, telephone numbers, deep web addresses, and QR codes physically placed on telephone poles in fourteen cities across five continents. The puzzles ran in 2012, 2013, and 2014. Each year more complex. The people who solved them were invited to a private forum, questioned about their beliefs on privacy and freedom, and asked to work on projects — including CAKES, a dead man's switch designed to automatically publish leaked documents if a whistleblower is killed or imprisoned. In 2014, the final puzzle introduced the Liber Primus — a 74-page book written in Anglo-Saxon runes. Only 17 pages have been decoded. The remaining 57 pages have resisted every decryption attempt for fourteen years. The last verified communication from Cicada 3301 was in April 2017: "Beware false paths." Nobody knows who created the puzzles. Nobody knows who placed the posters. The decoded pages contain philosophical writings about privacy, consciousness, and information freedom. The US Navy and GCHQ have since created their own puzzle-based recruitment programs explicitly inspired by Cicada 3301. Subscribe — GraveFile TV. These cases don't close.

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