- [Matthew] The internet goes much deeper
than you might think.
Here are 10 internet mysteries that are unsolved.
Number 10 is Cicada 3301.
On January 4th, 2012,
a posting on 4chan and Reddit
initiated one of the most elaborate puzzles ever,
Cicada 3301.
A new challenge is posted every year,
and ends with the sign-off 3301.
The first message claimed
to be seeking highly intelligent individuals.
To be considered, sleuths have to uncover
a hidden message in the image
that would lead to more puzzles.
The puzzles are incredibly difficult,
and can involve anything from cryptography,
computer programming, literature,
and Ancient Mayan numerology.
Some clues are even hidden in physical locations
around the world.
The riddles lead to the dark web,
and potentially access to a private forum.
But anyone who's gotten that far hasn't said
what happens after that.
But who's actually running Cicada is a mystery.
There's speculation that it could be the CIA,
or some other government spy agency,
or even a bank testing digital currency.
Number nine is GhostNet.
GhostNet was first uncovered in 2009,
and revealed a global cyber-espionage network.
The Munk Center at the University of Toronto
discovered it after a 10-month investigation.
The office of the Dalai Lama has contacted the center,
because they believed their systems
had been infected with malware by the Chinese government.
By then, it had already infected nearly 1300 computers,
including foreign ministries and embassies in 103 countries.
Once GhostNet gained access to a computer
with a Trojan horse,
it could monitor emails,
search secret files,
and even access and record
from its microphone and webcam undetected.
Even though the majority of the network
was in China and on government servers,
the Chinese government was never officially blamed
for GhostNet.
A non-state, for-profit organization,
patriotic hackers,
or even Russia,
or the CIA,
could be behind it.
But today, its origins are still a mystery.
Number eight is Gary McKinnon's NASA hack.
Between February 2001 and March of 2002,
Gary McKinnon, a systems administrator and hacker
from Glasgow, Scotland,
hacked into 97 NASA and US Military computers.
What became the biggest military hack of all time,
all started because McKinnon simply wanted to investigate
the existence and coverup of UFO technologies.
In post-9/11 America,
wanting to arrest the guy who shutdown
most of the US government's network is understandable.
But there maybe more than they're trying to coverup.
Apparently, McKinnon found top secret records and documents
that contained information about non-terrestrial officers
and US initiatives,
complete with images of mysterious space ships
that aren't in the public record.
The US tried to have him extradited.
But they were officially blocked by Britain in 2012.
Did McKinnon uncover something that the US government
wants kept under wraps?
We may never know for sure.
Number seven is 11B-X-1371.
In mid-2015, the co-founder of the Swedish tech blog,
gadgetzz.com,
John-Erik Johny Krahbichler,
received a bizarre and anonymous DVD in the mail,
that became known as 11B-X-1371.
The DVD had a long alphanumeric string written on it,
and a played a creepy two-minute black and white video
of a mysterious person in a plague doctor mask.
And is full of ciphers and hidden images.
The video went viral after Johny shared it on Reddit
to get help decoding it.
It was uncovered that it was filmed in an asylum in Poland,
and contains a bunch of disturbing images of torture
and real crime scene photos.
On December 31st, 2015,
someone by the name of Parker Warner Wright
claimed to be behind the video,
and uploaded a follow-up, 11B-3-1369,
that proved that he was the man behind the mask.
Wright claims it was an art piece.
But has kept the real meaning of the videos a mystery
that remains to this day.
Number six is Lake City Quiet Pills.
In 2009, redditor26 posted that his friend
and follow redditor, ReligionOfPeace had died.
ReligionOfPeace, aka Milo,
was on Reddit for six years,
and has believed to have a military background.
He also ran the image site lakecityquietpills.com.
Reddit Snopes started digging,
and found that hidden in the site's source code,
were numerous messages from other site users,
that looked like coded job ads.
The messages were encrypted once redditors got close.
But it appears that Lake City Quiet Pills
is actually a nickname for bullets made in Lake City, Iowa,
and that those ads
were really covert international assignments.
One of the codes matched up with the assassination
of Hamas leader, Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh,
on January 19th, 2010, in Dubai.
An international investigation found
that the suspect's had used credit cards
from a bank near Lake City.
But only one was ever arrested.
Number five is mortis.com.
Sometime before 2012,
a mysterious password protected website
called mortis.com,
was investigated by some curious users on 4chan's
Paranormal /x/ board.
Interest in cracking the website's passcode increased,
and several people tried and failed to crack
the site's passcode.
But someone did manage to access the site's sub-domain list,
and found the email addresses attached to the site.
One of the emails was mortis@mortis.com.
And it was connected to a file storage account,
that contained numerous files.
Deeper investigation found that the site
was actually owned by a man named Thomas Ling.
And he owns several other similar sites
under other identities,
all of whom were dead people.
Soon after all this intriguing information was discovered,
the FBI jumped in and shut the site down.
Nobody knows what was in those files,
or who Ling,
or even the real person using his identity was.
Number four is YAYVIDEOGAMES.
On August 13th, 2010,
Reddit user, YAYVIDEOGAMES,
made a simple post to /r/gaming,
with the headline
Ubisoft goes Steamworks, bye-bye, always on DRM.
Nobody would've noticed
how incredibly strange this post was
if they hadn't casually scrolled
through the comment section,
and noticed that YAY had created over 4000 comments
to his own post.
Every single comment repeated the headline.
Some of the identical comments
included image links that were attached
to different words or letters.
And those images are where things got really creepy.
The random linked images included an old picture of doctors,
a picture of a creepy mascot, among others.
The user also posted the same sentence
to several other video game forums on the internet.
But to this day,
no one knows who is behind the postings
and what their motive or objective was.
But it sure was creepy and disturbing.
Number three is Mariana's Web.
Below the 555 million pages you can find in search engines
exists the deep web,
a part of the internet that is only available
through networks like Tor.
The deep web contains lots of different sites.
Some that host highly illegal things
like contract killers, black markets, and hacker groups.
By some estimates,
the deep web is 500 times bigger than the web we know.
Theoretically, there is a level below the deep web,
that is known as Mariana's Web,
a closed network that could contain the data banks
of the most highly guarded information on Earth.
Technically, Mariana's Web can only be accessed
through an algorithm called polymeric falcighol derivation.
Something that can only be run on quantum computers,
which have yet to be invented.
When or if this level of the web is accessed,
some speculate that it could uncover
a sentient digital AI that has been hiding.
Number two is What Was the Point of A858.
A858 was the name of a mysterious subreddit page
that appeared in 2011
with a series of posts that were comprised purely
of seemingly random digits and letters.
The sole user behind all the odd posts
would continue to make posts over the next five years.
Reddit users discovered that the posts
were actually hexadecimal codes
that could be deciphered.
Some of the solved codes revealed small messages,
like thank you,
while others contained ASCII images.
On September 28th, 2016,
a separate subreddit,
dedicated entirely to solving A858,
announced that they had made contact
with the individual behind the site.
Apparently, he was a single person
that was hired and paid by an even more mysterious company
for reasons completely unknown to anyone.
Nobody knows the point of the project to this day.
But some redditors believe that the game is still afoot.
And many of A858's posts remain unsolved.
And number one is Who Created Bitcoin.
Released on Halloween, October 31st, 2008,
Bitcoin is a crypto-currency and electronic payment method.
While it's accepted as payment
by over 100,000 vendors and merchants today,
the origins of this money replacement
are shrouded in mystery.
Generated by software that can only be accessed
after digital codes are cracked,
Bitcoin was made by a person or persons
that are known as Satoshi Nakamoto.
As of today, their true identity has still to be uncovered.
Bitcoin is now a very valuable resource,
even though it's completely digital.
One Bitcoin is the financial equivalent
of over $1100 US Dollars.
And it has been rumored
that the individual or group behind it
created the currency and the challenges
that need to be overcome to obtain it
to increase its value,
while they horde over one million Bitcoins
to sell when it hits its peak.
Of course, it's possible we'll never know,
nor who's behind it.
But thank you very much for watching this.
As always, my name's Matthew Santoro.
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Thank you for watching.