Situational Awareness: Cicada 3301

Paying attention in an automated fashion for brand defense.

One of the very first things we did here, ten days into this Substack going live, was to work on Situational Awareness. The internet is a busy place and it’s nice to have some stuff that just stands watch for you.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Cicada 3301 stuff for a while. Yesterday they agreed to a paid Inoreader for tracking. This is part of my Brand Defense Strategist duties.

Attention Conservation Notice:

A simple way to stay on top of stuff, review for those who’ve been here, some basic tradecraft for those of you who are new. If standing guard is part of your world, make sure you know how to do these things.

Setup:

Made a ProtonMail account, created an Inoreader account, made some Talkwalker Alerts, then created a Dropbox so Inoreader has a place to stash automatically created PDFs. The Discord is for use in Cloak.

Now anything that happens gets saved when it happens in a somewhat immutable fashion - the Inoreader account will save stuff from RSS feeds, the Talkwalker Alerts are saved as both email and RSS feeds, and the two gigabyte Dropbox will hold a LOT of automatically created PDFs. That’s still just intel, not evidence, but once it’s stashed in this fashion, the internet can’t disappear it.

Cloak:

Maltego recently purchased Hunchly and shortly after that Cloak got a nice upgrade. This is still not a public product but it took a giant step forward in usability, and I’m grateful for the small fleet of eval accounts they’ve provided. Two of them are getting cleansed of prior activity and they’ll be put to work on Cicada 3301’s troubles.

The Cloak remote desktop protects observers from the slings and arrows of various Cicada 3301 foes, and it also provides Hunchly, so we can preserve online content in an admissible fashion.

If you’d like to get a lot of Cloak functionality, with Hunchly included, their Cloud offering does that. If you’re really price sensitive you can get Hunchly Classic and put it in a Persona Compartment. And if you just want to poke around, you’ve got a month at no cost.

Current Environment:

The two big things going on for the collective are the Russian ransomware gang that’s using the brand and the lawsuit in Michigan. There is also an intermittent rumble of deeply unwell people attributing their gang stalking delusions to Cicada 3301.

I’ve seen a draft of an ethics statement going around, it basically specifies “no harmful intent” as a requirement to associate. That won’t stop the clinical paranoids from exercising their brain chemistry problems, but it will speak to family, friends, etc who are trying to work out if there’s any substance to their claums.

Conclusion:

There are other, deeper things that can be done to stay on top of happenings, but this simple setup with the $120/year Inoreader account covers a lot of ground in a short amount of time.

If you just want a test drive you can accomplish that with the free Inoreader, the only thing you won’t get is the automatic PDF generation, and you get a month to explore what Hunchly offers. If you just want some preservation and you’re not producing evidence, Save As MHT (Chrome) or Save As MHT (Firefox) offer a set of functions similar to Hunchly, albeit much reduced.

So there you have it. This took me all of an hour, writing this post as I was building it out. If you don’t have a specific problem already in mind, just pick out some topic or a cluster of public figures, and get familiar with how this job is done.