CHAPTER 37
— IN THE PARANORMAL SECTION of the 4Chan.com chat an image was posted anonymously, in the image it read:
"We are looking for highly intelligent individuals, to find them, we created a test.
There is a message hidden inside this image.
Find her and she will lead you down the road to find us. We look forward to meeting the few who will make it all the way.
Good luck
3301"
— That was the image/message that started it all.
Yuliya nodded.
— This message was posted by an anonymous user on 4Chan, which is a very famous forum where people choose to be anonymous or not, and obviously it started to get the attention of a lot of people curious about what it was about. The image talked about having a message hidden inside it, it's an image with a black background and white characters, which for an ordinary person, didn't mean anything at all.
— But for people of your caliber of cyber expertise, it would be a simple thing to do — Greg said.
— Initially yes, at least that first step...
— So you would consider putting it in Photoshop, increasing the brightness and seeing if there is anything hidden in the black part of the image, increasing the brightness of it, finding a bunch of little squares scattered around the image, that will be important, but not now.
It shows on the screen of the slide that showed in real time what was happening on the screen of your notebook.
— What you needed to do was save it to your computer and open it as a — .txt— file in your notebook and find this riot of letters, numbers and codes, known as bytes, which initially don't mean at all. anything.
— It looks like a maze of letters and numbers.
— That's exactly what the cryptographers want this to look like, Greg.
— Moving on, if you go down to the end of these characters you find this:
He selected the letters that made up a name.
TIBERIVS CLAUDIVS CAESAR.
— Tiberius? The Roman Emperor?
— Exactly...
— But look at the rest...
— TIBERIVS CLAUDIVS CAESAR says "lxxt>33m2mqkyv 2gsq3q=w]02ntk"
— He said this?
Zumerick and Yuliya laugh.
— Actually the tip is quite simple, it refers to the Cipher in Caesar which is an ancient cryptography used by Julius Caesar, which basically consists of you taking a letter of the alphabet and skipping a random number of times, as Tiberius was the fourth Emperor of Rome, so you have to skip four letters of the alphabet.
— Apparently it wouldn't be that simple.
— And it's not... because the Caesar Cipher uses only the conventional alphabet, and here we have letters, numbers, and special characters.
— The symbol of equals...
— Exactly... that's where the fun begins...
— So how do you apply it?
— You have to abandon the conventional alphabet and use what we call an — ASCII— table, which is the table that categorizes all computer characters into numbers.
He opened the table.
— And now you take the code and go back four values for each letter and find this:
http://i.imgur.com/m9sYK.jpg
— A link to a website?
Zumerick nodded.
— Now we know the famous DUCK.
— Duck?
He laughed...
— The famous WOOPS duck...