The Pirate Bay, once the most popular file-sharing website on the planet, went down on December 9 after police raided its data center in Sweden. Since then, however, it has been dropping hints left right and center, most recently to reveal that February 1 will be a big day.

One such hint, a mystery code at the bottom of the site’s homepage named aes.png, has now finally been cracked. Reddit user dafky2000 decrypted the string, which unsurprisingly was encrypted using AES (the key was “wearetpb” – this text showed up on the main page at the start of the year):

The string decodes as follows:

00000000 68 74 74 70 73 3a 2f 2f 77 77 77 2e 79 6f 75 74 |https://www.yout|

00000010 75 62 65 2e 63 6f 6d 2f 77 61 74 63 68 3f 76 3d |ube.com/watch?v=|

00000020 2d 59 45 47 39 44 67 52 48 68 41 00 00 00 00 00 |-YEG9DgRHhA…..|

The resulting YouTube link points to an Arnold Schwarzenegger “I’ll Be Back” supercut video:

Readers of The Pirate Bay outage saga will remember that this is the same string of letters and numbers that was discovered to lead a BitTorrent Sync key, which in turn gave access to a folder with various The Pirate Bay files. It was never clear whether The BitTorrent Sync folder was created after or before the string went up on The Pirate Bay homepage, however, and either way it had public read-write access, so it wasn’t long before it ended up empty.

As we noted before, The Pirate Bay story is far from over, and this latest find further confirms that the owners controlling the domain plan on some sort of return. What form that will take, however, is still not clear.

The only official statement from the group so far was made on December 15, when a member said no decision had been made whether the site would return. On December 22, the official thepiratebay.se domain suddenly came back online, however, and has been getting regular updates ever since.

Just last week, the site was changed yet again to have The Pirate Bay logo in the bottom-right corner slowly “move” to a new image named totheisland.png in the bottom-left corner. The CSS class for the image is called “setsail” – another small hint that doesn’t reveal much.

Also in the last update, The Pirate Bay added a new “pipe vi Makefile” class for the encrypted AES code. Maybe this was what gave dafky2000 the final hint he needed to crack it.

The Java program created to unveil the hidden message is available on Pastie. You can also try the command “echo “JyO7wNzc8xht47QKWohfDVj6Sc2qH+X5tBCT+uetocIJcjQnp/2f1ViEBR+ty0Cz” | openssl aes-128-cbc -K $(printf wearetpb | sha256sum | head -c 32 | tr ‘[:lower:]’ ‘[:upper:]’) -nosalt -nopad -iv 0 -base64 -d -p” yourself to verify the discovery.