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Cicada: Solving the Web's Deepest Mystery
David Kushner, 2015. Rolling Stone, 15 January 2015.
Feature built on interviews with solvers, among them Marcus Wanner, then 15, and a solver called Tekk. Dates the first image on 4chan to three days before 7 January 2012 and describes the opening steps: text hidden at the end of the image file, a Caesar shift keyed to "Tiberius Claudius Caesar", and a decoy duck image.
What it's used for here
Named-author account of the 2012 round and the solvers' experience.
Our copy
Research copy, for editors and curators. The work is the publisher's, so readers are sent to it. We keep this copy so the citation can be checked if the page changes or goes.
rollingstone.com · fetched 29 Oct 2026
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Cited by on this site 4 records
Cicada 3301
MYSThe mystery article
Cite it
Kushner, D. (2015). Cicada: Solving the Web's Deepest Mystery. Rolling Stone, 15 January 2015. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/cicada-solving-the-webs-deepest-mystery-84394/
@misc{kushner2015rollingstone,
author = {Kushner, David},
title = {Cicada: Solving the Web's Deepest Mystery},
howpublished = {Rolling Stone, 15 January 2015},
year = {2015},
url = {https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/cicada-solving-the-webs-deepest-mystery-84394/}
}TY - ELEC TI - Cicada: Solving the Web's Deepest Mystery AU - Kushner, David PY - 2015 JO - Rolling Stone, 15 January 2015 UR - https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/cicada-solving-the-webs-deepest-mystery-84394/ ER -
Kushner, David. “Cicada: Solving the Web's Deepest Mystery.” Rolling Stone, 15 January 2015 (2015).