At the end of the closed beta mail there was a link leading to a puzzle that's meant to keep us busy until the first closed beta mission opens. Come discuss it with us on discord: https://discord.gg/jgScw2n Here's a recap of what we found so far: Cycle 1 At the end of the closed beta mail there was a link to a sound clip (https://clyp.it/31qeq2bw) We found a way to download it (http://annonymus.net/files/cycle1.ogg) Said clip's spectogram looks suspiciously like a binary signal (http://annonymus.net/images/NT4spectogram.png) This is a transcription of the high/low states: LEFT CHANNEL: 110100011011100110010101_100101010110101010101010100011 RIGHT CHANNEL: 010000100011010000100110_000011100110001111010111000011 After this, the file has been revised (https://clyp.it/0d3bwrb3) After downloading it (http://annonymus.net/files/Cycle1Revised.mp3) And making a spectogram (http://annonymus.net/images/spectogram2.png) We discovered that it is the same signal found in the previous clip with the following differences: The clock frequency is lower and much more regular (~0.25s) The big pause in the middle has been removed There is a small pause (~0.02s) after every 3rd bit The left and right channels have been inverted There are slight changes in the former-right channel The new transcript is as follows: LEFT : 010000100110010000100110000011100110001111010111000110 RIGHT: 110100011011100110010101100101010110101010101010100011 After agonizing over it for a while we discovered that it's braille and translates to ⠓⠁⠎⠞⠑⠃⠊⠝⠁⠵⠊⠛⠥⠺⠕⠺⠁⠞. Which means hastebinaziguwowat. Cycle 2 http://hastebin.com/aziguwowat contains the following code: C1 99 83 88 89 A5 85 40 C3 81 93 93 40 7B 7A C1 E4 E2 E3 C5 D9 C5 We got stuck on this for a while, despite trying many things like: ASCII. Not in the correct value ranges. Unicode. Doesn't translate to anything. Braille, again. The number of bits is not a multiple of 3. An image. There aren't enough bits to make up an image of any reasonable size Something to be XOR'd, OR'd or AND'd together. A compressed file. At this point codex took pity on us and gave us a hint: It's something old. We tried all manners of: OPcodes. @Hobbes#8752 and @Bruteforce123#9550 have been working to disassemble it from every architecture they could find, but found nothing Then we got another hint! A picture of... a bee? (http://annonymus.net/files/NT4bee.ico) So apparently eye bee m (IBM) was involved. A little searching revealed IBM's EBCDIC, a character table used for storing text in a binary format, like ASCII. Aplying EBCDIC to the hex gets us the string ARCHIVE_CALL_#:AUSTERE The TBW Archive does indeed contain an entry for AUSTERE. It's a picture of a missile launch (http://annonymus.net/files/minutemanLaunch.jpg) Inspecting the file further reveals it's actually a disguised archive. Opening the file in WinRar shows it to be a password-protected self-extracting zip. Trying to find the password we identified the image - it's of a LGM-30F Minuteman-II ICBM A few failed attempts at guessing the password later somebody suggests we try the launch code of the shown missile... Between 1962 and 1977 the launch code for all minuteman missiles was 00000000 Indeed, that is the password of the self extracting zip, revealing its contents to be a single image (http://annonymus.net/images/NON_AGENCY_ASSET_OVERVIEW.png) Said image is a report regarding a Morpho Medical employee. That is the end of Cycle 2 and the gauntlet.
I managed to solve it from the spectrogram and Braille like this: https://imgur.com/a/UHSgv The result is next phase: Spoiler https://hastebin.com/aziguwowat
It's actually EBCDIC hex which I used from this site: https://shop.alterlinks.com/ascii-table/ascii-ebcdic-us.php which gives us: C1 99 83 88 89 A5 85 40 C3 81 93 A r c h i v e _ C a l 93 40 7B 7A C1 E4 E2 E3 C5 D9 C5 l _ # : A U S T E R E I immediately associtated this with TBW archive and found this image: http://archive.blackwatchmen.com/search/AUSTERE its an image of an LGM-30 Minuteman
