The metadata of the very
first image told Eriksson the height and width of the image, which he thought could be the other two numbers. He did the math and was led to another site that told him GPS coordinates that led to fourteen cities in countries including Russia, America, France, South Korea, Australia and Poland. Due to geographic limitations, Eriksson had to rely on other people on the Cicada 3301 trail in those parts of the world. What they found were images of a cicada and a QR code. Scanning the code showed another two images with even more hidden text that was found to be a part of a poem called Agrippa, by William Gibson. Applying the book code that had brought him to the Reddit site, he was directed to an address on the anonymous Tor network on the dark web.
Unfortunately, by the time he arrived, Cicada 3301 had put up a message stating that they were disappointed in the groups of people that had formed to share parts of the puzzles they discovered without any one member completing all the steps along the way. Eriksson had seen the message slightly later than everyone else did. If he had seen it just a little bit sooner, he might have discovered what was beyond the Tor site Cicada had set up, and why Cicada had set up such an elaborate puzzle.
Most people believe that Cicada 3301 was a recruitment tool for government intelligence agencies, such as the NSA, CIA, and MI6. This seems plausible, as most of the countries that had cities with clues in them (Russia, America, France, South Korea, Australia and Poland) were places with talented hackers and IT security researchers. However, most government agencies wouldn’t use such a long puzzle to recruit, because many people would lose interest. Eriksson believes that it is mostly likely an underground agency that is “intellectual, anti-establishment, ideologically driven and values logical and analytical thinking.” The group probably would not need to be large, because it would not take many people to plan it.
The Cicada 3301 puzzle has left many questions unanswered. Other people may have made it past the Tor site. Why aren’t they talking? And why would people spend so much time creating such an elaborate problem? Perhaps the 2017 puzzle will bring us closer to the answers of this prevailing enigma..