We would like to congratulate all of the 2011 cover challenge winners!  For those of you who are still working through the puzzle, or have not yet started, spoilers lurk ahead.  The winners are:

First place: Dan  Caselden and Jon Erickson of Maryland

Second place: Michael Oglesby of Oklahoma (also last year’s winner – see his write-up)

Third place: Joerie de Gram of the Netherlands

Honorable mention:  Michael Czumak III of New York

Much to our surprise, all of these gentlemen solved the puzzle within one week of the DBIR release (compared to just under one month for last year’s challenge).  I must admit that the RISK team practically spewed their morning coffee on their respective keyboards when we found Dan’s email in our Inbox on April, 20.  For those of you scoring at home, that is one day after the report was released.

We asked for a recap of their process in solving the puzzle and were relieved that a) the clues we left made sense and worked b) Dan and Jon followed the expected path that we laid out almost exactly as we planned and c) they worked throughout the day to ultimately achieve the solution.

(If you are still reading, the spoilers begin now.  If you haven’t already read Michael’s breakdown of the challenge, or have some gist of the puzzle solution I would highly recommend reading that first.)

Here is some insight to our thought process in building the challenge:

·         The idea to incorporate the Three Wolf Shirt meme into the DBIR as a pop-culture reference and ultimately a key component of the challenge came from a cartoon on xkcd.com in which the ownership of said shirt is mocked; the 3 wolf meme began in late 2008 and peaked in 2009.  That is a ‘has-been’ in terms of Internet sensations.

·         “Cover Guy”, aka @TresL0b0sDude is an inside joke for the RISK team, and is actually an altered photo of a co-worker wearing those goofy white sunglasses.  We just had to use him as one of our suspects on the cover and incorporate the persona into the challenge.

·         The use of the twitter account as a means to ultimately find the full Cover Guy image is a result of our expected practice of Amazon to compress any user submitted images.  We were excited to give the customer images for the 3 Wolf Moon shirt some more clicks and to submit some of our own images.

·         We knew that we wanted to use both steganography and a book cipher in this year’s challenge.  Previous years’ challenge participants had run the PDF though a suite of stego tools in attempts to solve the puzzle, so we decided this was the year to introduce this form of cryptography.  The fun part was to figure out how to provide both the tool and password needed to pull the .txt from the image.  The hidden ‘pw’ in the picture of the cat, (full name Scout Millhouse Spitler) was meant to be a softball.   Figuring out that SilentEye was the tool we used was supposed to be the more challenging part.  We had people incorporate the cat into Google searches along with Silent Eye and ultimately spin their wheels at that point.  It is interesting that something that was meant to be easy “I will just put a picture of my cat in there, and make the password cat” is not obvious for someone who has made it that far, and is perhaps expecting something more complex.

·         We apologize for those that went through all of the steps, pulled the text string out of the image, decrypted the hidden text on the back cover, and expected to be met with the instructions for their prize.  We can’t blame you since that is where it ended last year.  We shared many an evil grin thinking about the heartburn that must have been caused when you were met, instead, by  a string of numbers.

·         The fact that the numbers ranged from 1-26, and thus easily confused for an alphabet substitution cipher, was an unintentional red herring and a product of the page count of the 2008 report.

·         We knew that the pplwc clue on page 72 was going to be a challenge, in fact, it was not even used by Dan and Jon. They realized that the string of numbers was divisible by 5 and figured out what each individual number referred to. A big concern was that people would hit a wall at that point, and we are glad that the book cipher was broken with and without the pplwc clue.

We hope that this year’s challenge was fun for all of the people who stepped up to the plate and kudos to  Dan, Jon, Michael O. (again), Joerie, and Michael C. on their correct submissions

This entry was posted on Monday, May 16th, 2011 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.