4chan
On January 4th, 2012, final.jpg was posted to 4chan‘s paranormal board, /x.
x, as a community, is remarkably full of bullshit — as you might expect from a paranormal-centered forum. final.jpg blended in remarkably well; no one could have imagined the lengthy journey it would lead to. Inevitably, some users inspected the image to uncover the hidden message it proclaimed. One of the first things that was done was to examine final.jpg in simple text editors like Notepad. In short order, it was noticed that a particular string was appended to the image’s data, readily visible at the very end of the garbled characters viewable by opening an image in a text editor:
TIBERIVS CLAVDIVS CAESAR says “lxxt>33m2mqkyv2gsq3q=w]O2ntk”
This was quickly realized to be a +4 Caesar Cipher , as hinted at by the Tiberius Claudius Caesar reference. By working your way through the Caesar Cipher, it becomes apparent that a simple Caesar cipher is insufficient for the totality of the message — what is actually needed is a +4 Shift Cipher incorporating the characters of the ASCII table.
The deciphered message read as follows:
https://i.imgur.com/m9sYK.jpg
Imgur
Following the Imgur link, we come to: https://imgur.com/m9sYK and are greeted with this image:
This is an image of a normal decoy duck. The bright pink feather on its side is just a normal speculum feather. The words ‘guess’ and ‘out’ pointed us toward the steganographical program, ‘Outguess‘. Applying OutGuess to final.jpg yielded the following message:
Here is a book code. To find the book, and more information, go to http://www.reddit.com/r/a2e7j6ic78h0j/
1:20, 2:3, 3:5, 4:20, 5:5, 6:53, 7:1, 8:8, 9:2, 10:4, 11:8, 12:4, 13:13, 14:4, 15:8, 16:4, 17:5, 18:14, 19:7, 20:31, 21:12, 22:36, 23:2, 24:3, 25:5, 26:65, 27:5, 28:1, 29:2, 30:18, 31:32, 32:10, 33:3, 34:25, 35:10, 36:7, 37:20, 38:10, 39:32, 40:4, 41:40, 42:11, 43:9, 44:13, 45:6, 46:3, 47:5, 48:43, 49:17, 50:13, 51:4, 52:2, 53:18, 54:4, 55:6, 56:4, 57:24, 58:64, 59:5, 60:37, 61:60, 62:12, 63:6, 64:8, 65:5, 66:18, 67:45, 68:10, 69:2, 70:17, 71:9, 72:20, 73:2, 74:34, 75:13, 76:21
Good luck.
3301
Subreddit
Solvers arrived at the aforementioned subreddit, r/a2e7j6ic780j
Book
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