I'm Dave, I'm one of the creators of Cicada.

It was a hoax.

We were four friends from MIT who decided to do some Internet trolling back in 2012. However it quickly grew and we got a bit carried away. The year 2012 and it's riddles were planned from the beginning. We didn't plan on doing any more puzzles after 2012 but since it blew up we decided to continue.

However, we didn't really know what to post to still have it seem mysterious. Which is why, it, after a while, started becoming more about reaching enlightenment than about compsci and math. It all ended in 2014 however, when someone, somehow, traced it back to our sysadmin and actually rang on his door. We decided there and then that this had to stop before more people actually found us. We still don't know how he found us since we thought we were pretty good at covering our tracks. But we did mess up with the status page once on one of our apache installs so I guess we messed up more times. Either way, that's why everything got taken down and why we never finished the 2014 riddles, and why we haven't posted anymore after that. We didn't have a plan with it, we didn't even think it'd work. We thought we made it way too hard, but the Internet is amazing sometimes. Scary, but amazing.

I'll try to answer a few question that I'm sure will come up:

Posters in different countries on poles: One of them outside of the US was posted by our group, rest posted by our Internet friends. Two in the US was posted by relatives and the rest were posted by us. It wasn't anything more exciting than that. But it was fun to see the theories online about how big and rich our organization must've been.

Why: Why not? We don't really have a reason to tbh. We just thought it'd be fun. I'm sorry but I don't have a better answer.

Why isn't this PGP signed: I don't have access to the key. As far as I knew, our sysadmin had deleted the virtual machine we used for everything. I didn't even know anyone in the group still had access to the twitter account until yesterday when I happened to read about Cicada 3301 and clicked the link and saw that it had a post from 2016. That's the reason why I made this post.

The people who claimed they won and got into our organization: They're lying. There never was any organization. We were four men from MIT. I think we replied to someones mail once or twice and then we left it and didn't touch it until 2013.

Did you ever provide solutions when the Internet got stuck: We did, a few times. Like those almost impossible solutions like XOR and then invert the bytes etc. No one would've solved that without us helping. We loved feeling like the NSA, watching in the shadows, reading IRC and the web about people trying to solve it. When we felt they didn't get anywere we either dropped a few helpful hints or gave out the solution so they could continue the search.