![]() ![]() Caesar, he knew, was one of the most ancient forms of encryption, dating back to Julius Caesar, who used the cipher to safeguard military secrets. Sony Pictures Under Siege as Hackers Leak Upcoming Films “That’s like the chamber pot of the Internet.” “Dude, you can’t be on 4chan on school computers – that’s not wise!” Tekk recalls saying. But his life took an unexpected turn that day when a friend in robotics lab showed him a mysterious image he’d seen on 4chan. At the time, he was just another sheltered 15-year-old nerd in suburbia, webmaster for his high school paper, and an earnestly goofy coder (one of his sites allows visitors to send virtual fruit to one another). “With Cicada, no one knows what the goal is,” says one cipher expert, “or how you know when you won.” This is clear when someone accidentally drops a plate nearby us and Tekk, a pasty, scruffy 18-year-old with thick black hair and glasses, whips around in a panic. He’s been feeling paranoid ever since he stumbled upon 3301, which is how he met Marcus. Or the name of the university where he recently started as a freshman, or where we meet for pizza one night this past fall. With one click on the IRC link, Marcus said fuck it and went inside – not knowing what or whom he’d find. Then again, he thought, maybe it was time he didn’t ask permission. Marcus tried to imagine himself asking his parents for permission to chat with strangers on a site that had made a picture of a guy stretching open his asshole the Net’s grossest meme. Someone on 4chan had created an Internet Relay Chat channel where people were logging in to discuss the bizarre message. With the exception of the Rubik’s Cube, which he could solve in under a minute, puzzles were dull. “And then I was like, ‘Aw, fuck it.’ ”įor all Marcus knew, it could have been another dumb 4chan prank. “Until a point, I tried to go with the flow,” he says. ![]() “He’s light-years ahead of us.” Marcus was a good kid, dependable, hardworking, the leader of his Boy Scout troop, just a project away from Eagle Scout. “There was no way we could check what he was up to if he covered his tracks,” his mother admits. “It was the Big-Brother-eye-over-the-shoulder thing,” he says. To make sure he was abiding, he was restricted to the living-room computer, which they could see. He couldn’t send an e-mail or register on a website without their permission. Though Marcus was gifted with computers, his mom and dad, an electrical engineer, also locked him down online. “I missed out on a lot,” he recalls with a sigh. Shuttling Marcus between home, church and the Boy Scouts seemed like the best way to keep him away from trouble (and girls). A skinny 15-year-old brainiac with wire-frame glasses and wavy brown hair, he was the eldest of five, home-schooled by their mother, a devout Catholic, near Roanoke, Virginia. ![]() Marcus Wanner needed a little adventure in his life. ![]()
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