Cicada 3301 is a mysterious organization posting highly complex puzzles across the net. After two years, the answer may finally be in sight.
In January 2012 this image was posted to 4chan's "random" board.
Via en.wikipedia.org
He knew it was an example of digital steganography: a way of hiding an encoded message in an image. A sender might, for example, start with an innocuous image file and adjust the color of every 100th pixel to correspond to a letter in the alphabet.
Eriksson tried decoding 3301's message. After only a few minutes work he'd got somewhere: a reference to "Tiberius Claudius Caesar" and a line of meaningless letters.
He worked out it was a "Caesar cypher", as used by Julius Caesar in private correspondence. From that, he found a new web address.
Via en.wikipedia.org
It led to this picture. He ran it through a decryption programme, and found another link to a Reddit messageboard. There were encrypted links to books on it, along with lines and dots.
