Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077
Active since 2018-06-10
A hacker at E3 2018 exposed a live website linked to upcoming release Cyberpunk 2077.
Type	Official
Creator	CD PROJEKT RED
Discovered	2018-06-10

Main Page > List of Investigations > Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is a story-driven, open world RPG set in a dark future from CD PROJEKT RED (CDPR), creators of The Witcher series of games. As the release of Cyberpunk 2077 drew closer, CDPR began trickling hidden messages and puzzles to the community. The ARG is comprised of these puzzles, and quick solvers are often rewarded with Cyberpunk merchandise.

A "hacker" infiltrates Microsoft's E3 2018 presentation.

2018

E3 Presentation

During Microsoft's E3 2018 presentation slot on June 10th, a "hacker" interrupted the speaker, ultimately revealing a trailer for Cyberpunk 2077. Players immediately noticed some valuable info during the trailer, including GOG codes which were redeemable for games and, most notably, an IP address, 212.91.11.20.

Quadra

The IP address led to a server with a password prompt.

Players quickly realized that the IP resolved to a section of CDPR's Cyberpunk 2077 website, where a password prompt was found along with a welcome message. The message read as follows:

WELCOME TO QUADRA - THE HIGH-PERFORMANCE AUTOMOTIVE SOLUTIONS
WITH A SOUL. PLEASE ENTER YOUR QUADRA VIP USER CREDENTIALS.

The login field is force-filled to QUADRA V-TECH, which players connected to a license plate number from the trailer, NC20 CP77, which turned out to be the correct password. Only a very small pool of players were allowed through, and were met with a field to enter their email address. Soon after, the site began to display a message indicating a quota had been reached and that no more emails would be collected.

Quota Met

Message which greeted players when the password was entered after the quota was filled.

ASCII-art output of the SSH server.

Art printed on the back of the t-shirts received by players who made the QUADRA cutoff.

Suspecting an ARG was building, players rummaged through the site and other related media. A a "secure" subdomain was found, along with a "E3 Schedule" file. RTSP is set up on the site, which players suspected might indicate future intent. Players discovered the site had an SSH server on the same host, which outputs an ASCII-art message. The other output, Permission denied (publickey), indicated a private key was be needed to access the server.

Players also uncovered more potential leads in the trailer, including lines of debug output from OpenSSH, barcodes, PDF417 codes, and several messages (usually on screens in the video), including one which points toward the QUADRA website.

... 10/11/2078 THE FOLLOWING WILL APPLY TO ALL

PROFILES ON DATA ALT//0 463.0983.890.3
DOMAIN-PUBLIC RESTRICTION REF. 192.8930.610.10

PUBLIC DATA PRESENTATION WILL TAKE PLACE ON MONDAY AT 12PM GMT+09 ON ALL DOMAINS. SERVER CAPABILITIES ARE ESTIMATED TO SUSTAIN 90% REGISTERED
USERS//

P2-OS CORPORATION, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Developers indicated in multiple messages via Discord that players should wait for more information.

Several users on Reddit who entered the password prior to the quota being met received emails from CDPR in the style of emails from QUADRA automotive, which request logistic and personal information from the player in order to deliver them a care package.

Players who made the QUADRA cutoff received a care package. It contained a CP2077 Quadra styled t-shirt in a QUADRA box. The art on the back of the t-shirt was mysterious, but players found no leads despite heavy analysis.

Trauma Team

On August 22, the ARG sparked up again when CDPR posted concept art on their Twitter. One of the pieces of concept art contained a bit.ly link in the background:

This link led to a first image. Opening that image in a text editor revealed a hidden message, after a long chunk of encoded text, which read Cesar said: oaawz://jku-s-tra.jkwyvqlraylk.jvt/pthnl/zljvuk.qwn. Using a 19 shift ROT, a link to a a second image was revealed. Players connected the phrase TT in the second image to a known CDPR-owned domain, the Trauma Team International website.

Screen seen by "winners" of the OrderID Trauma Team phase.

Need Insurance?

The tshirt art combined with the image attached to the TT winners' email as a grille cipher.

After accessing the website, players were met with a bot named David asking for an ID in order to talk to him. Further investigation revealed that the numbers from the first image gave the Login ID 0374337573334 for Trauma Team International.

Once logged in, David allowed players to "buy insurance" through Trauma Team. After doing so, each player was given a unique 10 character code, and David prompted these players to use their codes in the My Orders section of the site. After a specific amount of codes were given out, the bot went offline. The code was deciphered using ASCII85 (Z85 (ZeroMQ) variant), giving the ID #ID00000 which was usable in the My Orders section.

Players who made the cutoff were prompted to input their emails. Upon entering their emails, they were greeted with this image, pictured left, informing them that the process would take up to 7 days and thanking them for participating. After a certain amount of codes were used, the My Orders page went offline with the message "Connection failed," concluding this part of the ARG.

Frame hidden after gameplay stream.

Your Life is worth it!

On August 26th 2018, four days after players ripped through the Trauma Team International site, players who got through the cutoff received an email from a Trauma Team International Representative prompting them to reply with their address. The email had two attachments, a PDF and a PNG image. The image was a ciphertext which could be decoded with a grille cipher using the back of the t-shirt as the grille, pictured right. Players concluded that Monday was the most likely solution, and they were proven right when the next clue surfaced on Monday.

Base 64 Stream

On August 27th, CDPR began broadcasting the Base64 encoded text on their Twitch channel. Soon after, they gave a 48 min walkthrough of the gameplay of Cyberpunk 2077.

Players captured the video recording during the broadcast and extracted images periodically to gather most of the data. Using OCR (optical character recognition) on each image, and eliminating any duplicate lines, The image was decoded. The image was a screenshot of the beginning of the gameplay demo showing the closed elevator. So far, a difference comparison shows little discrepancy besides the overlay on the top of the frame. The only other thing of note aside from the gameplay itself was a frame hidden by CDPR right after the gameplay, pictured left, which included a few paragraphs explaining the stream and CDPR's motives, thoughts, etc.

Image tweeted by CDPR after E3 2019 containing binary code.

2019

E3 Season

While CDPR decided not to hack into anyone's show, shortly after their slotted presentation (which included a breathtaking Keanu appearance), they sent out a tweet which contained binary code translating to:

Seems you're not among the sheep after all. Wanna play a game? Watch for the beeps.

Players determined this to be both an homage to a small easter egg previously hidden on CDPR's site in which a light within the background decor of the site flashed Morse code translating to BEEP, and a possible hint at what is to come ARG-wise. Videos and tweets from this time were scoured for flashing lights or beeping sounds, but to no avail.

QR code found taped to CDPR's LA office door.

Initial Auramis screen as seen by players after scanning the LA QR code.

Pre-Order Shenanigans

Within days of the tweet hinting to watch for beeps, CDPR updated the CP2077 pre-order page, this time including code which caused the light-blue underscore on the site to again flash in Morse code. Decoded, it read:

33.9899317,-118.47565259999999

These numbers turned out to be the coordinates of a house across the street from CDPR's office in LA. This set players in motion, and before long they had obtained a picture of a QR code (pictured right) taped to CDPR's office door!

Auramis

The QR code led to a new page on the Cyberpunk.net site titled Auramis, an anagram of Samurai. The page includes a new IP address, 212.91.11.21 (another SSH server), a password-protected RAR file downloadable by clicking the "S" in "CYBERPUNK.NET/AURAMIS", as well as a seemingly cryptic message:

“THE FIRST CORPORATE WAR WAS FOUGHT IN BOARDROOMS, THE SECOND WAS FOUGHT ON BATTLEFIELDS, AND THE THIRD WAS FOUGHT IN SECRET. THE FOURTH WILL BE FOUGHT ON THE NET, AND EVERY GLOBAL POWER IS IN A RACE TO DEVELOP THE WEAPONS THAT WILL BE USED IN THIS CONFLICT.”

Along with these details was a note to players:

Hey there, Choomba!

If you’re reading this message, it means E3 has officially started 
and we’re there with Cyberpunk 2077, front and center.

We kicked things off big this year, announcing the release date, launching pre-orders, showing off a new trailer, and revealing the character of Johnny Silverhand. That’s plenty already, but we’ve still got some surprises up our sleeve — make sure to keep your eyes and ears open!

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for being with us!

Your friends at CD PROJEKT RED

Players quickly realized the RAR's password was Johnny Silverhand based on his mention in the second message on the page. The RAR file yielded a second password-protected RAR file, along with a text file titled NC.txt, which read:

Things will happen.
Plans in motion.
Wait for more.

Without a working password for the second RAR, players "waited for more"...

On July 12th 2019, Lilayaah, a staff member from CD PROJEKT RED tweeted this: 3^{eXa.Q9m^._78))3/X6Chd5,(7v~!L"ty"UmxjP6bRm2.wS!(TUMqgyBf6#%&+hm?C88+N'+&{\gL}9}Btzq<P:P=fAXb#Kb~qz{XfD^8+@hv$5Zuz$x< which turned out to be the password for the 2nd RAR file.

Inside this 2nd RAR was a file called 4035 only containing a sequence of numbers:

20-11-16-7-.-24-5-3-10-24-17-22-16

The name of the file, 4035, can be converted from octal to decimal which yields 2077, an obvious reference to the name of the game. Converting each number in the file from octal to decimal yields:

16-9-14-7-.-20-5-3-8-20-15-18-14

These numbers can then be converted into letters by using the corresponding letter of the alphabet, A = 1, B = 2, C = 3 etc. This yields the phrase PING.TECHTORN, an anagram of NIGHTCORP.NET, where the next part of the ARG is taking place.

NIGHTCORP.NET

This website's background are all just anagrams of nightcorp which look to be taken directly from an online anagram solver without alterations. Even though the edges are blurred, and there are 2 background images (depending on your monitor resolution), nothing of interest was found in the background image.

This website has a "button" that doesn't seem to be working, and in the code it appears to be playing an audio file, however the file is called silence.mp3, and is actually silent. Every now and then (see timestamps below) the website plays an actual sound, 13 in total, and they seem to be repeating every 24 hours.

Some technical details:

• Button is SVG graphic not bound to any event or action so requires website code update to make it actionable.
• Website have 2 interesting JS scripts - one is simple runtime and second one is simple application executed once every minute.
• Application makes request to https://nightcorp.net/tick every minute and plays audio if any available in response.

The sounds played are in different voices in different languages, and they all appear to be saying one number each.

spoken number	Timestamp (UTC)	Minutes apart	Language	Voice	link to mp3
9	14:32	103	Italian/Portugese	male	https://nightcorp.net/audio/5d1d19a4193563132d519e82dc8a4b18.mp3
6	15:12	40	Polish	female	https://nightcorp.net/audio/6068fb52d42f5719096912840c00d96d.mp3
3	17:05	113	German	female	https://nightcorp.net/audio/12a5afb62e0ec380a336aef48d57fbf5.mp3
6	19:26	141	Polish	male	https://nightcorp.net/audio/87b71da43b8be545a03b357d4500574b.mp3
8	20:16	50	Polish	female	https://nightcorp.net/audio/d76780f641c4b0ef0b687d443556ad76.mp3
7	22:49	153	English	male	https://nightcorp.net/audio/076a726a0afac7db977328e68157e868.mp3
1	01:27	158	Chinese	male	https://nightcorp.net/audio/b4da1148ca752f85a1e54004b5c1953a.mp3
9	03:35	128	Russian	female	https://nightcorp.net/audio/42f3db2850b9a903b337f3d1bebf4378.mp3
0	06:11	156	Japanese	female	https://nightcorp.net/audio/35c82f30b9da828e5ea4a85dbf58d89a.mp3
0	07:45	94	Spanish	male	https://nightcorp.net/audio/988a12c15660c722c33137189645e8a9.mp3
4	09:31	106	Polish	female	https://nightcorp.net/audio/8532da7644e83b4d3f2631bdd4008942.mp3
8	11:07	96	Korean	male	https://nightcorp.net/audio/224a23b086e16d1b219746cc202bd7f1.mp3
6	12:49	102	French	male	https://nightcorp.net/audio/bb56cfacdbdea4949c598f4c29c622d6.mp3

Corpthing

Players placed all the numbers one after another, starting at 00, to make 0048696368719.

This is a Polish telephone number, which answers callers with slash Uniform slash Charlie Oskar Romeo Papa Tango Hotel India November Golf and then either deletes or saves your message depending on if you made sound or not. (This is normal behaviour of a typical voicemail response system. No input is available during the phonecall.)

This lead players to a user on Reddit, /u/corpthing (which is an anagram for nightcorp, incidentally). Although the Redditer has answered some chat messages on the first day of discovery, none were answered that asked about ARG related stuff. No further chat messages were answered to this day.

On September 5, /u/corpthing in a conversation with one of the players (ShizaanSil#2039) shifted the conversation to the topic of NightCorp and revealed that Sandra Dorsett has escaped the hospital, and is looking to disrupt a big move that NightCorp is preparing.

SandraD

On September 9, discord user SandraD#9271 joined the #cyberpunk2077 channel and confronted ShizaanSil#2039. She claimed to have hacked /u/corpthing's account, and that he has found a keysheet that he will crack next week, and then give to ShizaanSil#2039. She said to "look for numbers and letters, and empty cells", and that "empty cells are the key".

On the same day, ShizaanSil#2039 contacted /u/corpthing and spoke about Sandra. /u/corpthing said that Sandra left a note which simply said "27", and sent the following message to several users:

DO NOT trust this corpo scum!

SD.

The transcription of /u/corpthing's conversations and SandraD's messages in Discord can be found here.

On the same day again, Cyberpunk 2077's official twitter account published a tweet with 27 sudoku puzzles. The "27" note and "Empty cells are the key" most likely refer to the number of puzzles and empty cells in Sudoku and could suggest a grille cypher, but the keysheet was unavailable at the time.

Sudoku observations:

• google doc with original ones in spreadsheet form: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NVyxaGk0GNXDljksg5DE-SX4QTFsExo7kQ7ZGArMoUY/edit?usp=sharing
• Every puzzle is centrally symmetrical which is not so common for grille ciphers (see 2nd page).
• Sometimes even numbers in puzzles is symmetrical.
• White space on first glance do not result in interesting shape (see 3rd page).

On September 19th /u/corpthing posted its first post on Reddit titled "Found this.", providing Cyberpunk detectives with the keysheet to a grille cypher. The pattern for fitting the sudoku puzzles on the keysheet is determined by the numbers that are already filled out in a sudoku and it goes as follows: 1, 23, 15, 10, 8, 20, 27, 22, 11, 4, 9, 19, 3, 14, 26, 17, 24, 12, 21, 7, 2, 6, 18, 25, where numbers from 1 to 27 are the numbers of sudoku puzzles. Superimposition of sudoku and keysheet can be found here.

Unused sudokus (5, 17, and 24) have not been shown to have any relevance.

When reading through lines of characters, one may read the following message (although it is unclear if all parts have any relevance):

V!

DIGITAL GHOST LOOK OUT!

BLACKWALL IS REAL

ALT CUNNINGHAM 
RUN AWAY!
THEY ARE WATCHING YOU

WEDNESDAY
SOULKLLLER (Likely supposed to be Soulk1ller, but all numbers were replaced by sudokus)
NETWATCH
ARASAKA

FIND SANDRA

CORPTHING IS THE ENEMY

ARE YOU A NETRUNNER

GARY

Sandra's code

On October 10, SandraD returned to #cyberpunk2077 channel and posted a cryptic code: WHA EANW NCA NT TCW ATCACH, and said to contact her once we manage to crack the code. The code was decoded into "THE REAL YOU IS NOT ENOUGH", using a substitution alphabet from repeating the word "NETWATCH", however SandraD has not replied to people sending her this solution.

A month later, on November 18, SandraD returned to #cyberpunk2077 to inform that the solution was wrong, and the actual solution was found to be just "NETWATCH", the key to the code. SandraD said that the riddle is a clue to the next step. The log of SandraD's messages can be found here.

Lilayah#2077 also chimed in on November 21st and said You got a key and you still didn't find what you actually should find. Her message logs can be found here.

NETWATCH-NCPD.COM

On November 23, using a domain search with "netwatch" as keyword, the site netwatch-ncpd.com has been found, in the same IP range as nightcorp.net. On the same day, the crawlers found a sub page with a login form, but likely much ahead of time as it does not appear to be relevant yet.

As of November 25, Lilayah's answer for what is left to do has been "you need to wait".

Envelopes

Around December 19th, 2019, four Cyberpunk 2077 content creators uploaded videos about receiving a package from CD Project Red. These packages contained 8 envelopes with clues and puzzles inside them, forming the next stage of the ARG.

The content creators announced that the envelopes were going to be opened one by one on multiple livestreams taking place from December 21st to December 23rd.

As the contents of the envelopes were revealed, it became apparent that five of these envelopes contained puzzles, while the remaining three envelopes contained hints to help the players in case they struggled with solving a puzzle.

Envelope #1

The first envelope was opened on December 21st. It contained a piece of paper titled Clue#01: Johnny and Alt with a sequence of letters underneath: ADRRR EF N VNNENF AEAD AAE FNVRF. The players realized that this code was similar to Sandra's Code, so this one would have to be solved the same way. Using the key NEVERFADEAWAY, which is the name of a song by Johnny Silverhand's band SAMURAI about him and Alt Cunningham, the players decoded the sequence of letters to THERE IS A CANVAS WITH TWO FACES.

Envelope #2

The second Envelope was opened on December 22nd. The sheet inside, titled Clue#02: Number, had a riddle on it:

My 1st is in Wales but not in Welsh.
My 2nd is in Iceland but not in Icelandic.
My 3rd is not in Sweden, but it is in Swedish.
My 4th is in England, but not in English.
My 5th is in Poland, but not in Polish.

The players also received a Hint, which reads You might need to use google translate.

Since the riddle was expected to result in one sentence or one word, it could be taken in a more literal sense:
The word's first letter is part of the word 'Wales', but does not appear in the word 'Welsh'
or, (since the first approach doesn't produce any useful results) combined with the hint:
The word's first letter is part of the word 'Wales', but does not appear in the welsh word for 'Wales'

Country name in English	Country name in local/native language	remaining letters
Wales	Cymru	w, a, l, e, s
Iceland	Ísland	c, e
Sweden	Sverige	v, r, i, g
England	Anglia	e, d
Poland	Polska	n, d

keep in mind that for the third line, sweden, the statement is the other way around compared to the others
With the remaining letters, it is possible to spell out SEVEN.

Envelope #3

The third Envelope was opened on the first livestream of December 23rd. A piece of paper inside, titled Clue#03: Next! stated the following riddle:
What is the fourth and final member of this set: 19, 28, 81, ?

After unsuccessfully trying out multiple approaches based in mathematics, the players found a different kind of pattern: When writing out the numbers as words, each number began and ended with the same letter. The sequence of numbers that fit this pattern is as follows: 19, 28, 38, 81, 83, 85, 89, 97, 102, 122, 132, 142, ...

Since 102 is the first number in this sequence after 81 that's also part of the grid of missing pixels from the QR Code from Envelope #5, the players assumed 102 to be the solution.

Envelope #4

The fourth envelope was opened on the second livestream of December 23rd. The piece of paper inside was titled Clue#04: What Time is it? and another riddle was written on it:

There is a clock in the archives - a normal clock with numerals 1 to 12 around the clockface. Someone has taken to sticking words or numbers over these numerals and moving the hands to show the time indicated by these. What time showed on the clock?

There was also a string of letters underneath this riddle:
YQSZUPJWKJYYEMMLVWOCVGSCWHCZMJOGBDKRSTXTSCOUQPQJSDK

Some players found the riddle's wording to be kind of peculiar and suggested that it might be inspired by another puzzle created by someone else. This speculation proved to be correct, as the source of the riddle was found shortly after that: The GCHQ Puzzle Book II, Puzzle #68, which had the same text structure and nearly the same wording. At that time, another hint had been revealed: Sum up the numbers from ciphertext. Using the puzzle book, the players managed to understand the way the puzzle worked and, after applying the hint to the modified version they were presented with, could solve the cipher.

Solving the Clock Cipher

The players had to write out the numbers from one to twelve and the ciphertext from underneath the riddle so that one stood above the other:
YQSZUPJWKJYYEMMLVWOCVGSCWHCZMJOGBDKRSTXTSCOUQPQJSDK
ONETWOTHREEFOURFIVESIXSEVENEIGHTNINETENELEVENTWELVE

The next step was to convert both strings into sequences of numbers, using the A1Z26 cipher:

25 17 19 26 21 16 10 23 11 10 25 25 05 13 13 12 22 23 15 03 22 07 19 03 23 08 03 26 13 10 15 07 02 04 11 18 19 20 24 20 19 03 15 21 17 16 17 10 19 04 11
15 14 05 20 23 15 20 08 18 05 05 06 15 21 18 06 09 22 05 19 09 24 19 05 22 05 14 05 09 07 08 20 14 09 14 05 20 05 14 05 12 05 22 05 14 20 23 05 12 22 05

Now, the numbers that aligned vertically had to be added together to form a third sequence of numbers:

40 31 24 46 44 31 30 31 29 15 30 31 20 34 31 18 31 45 20 22 31 31 38 08 45 13 17 31 22 17 23 27 16 13 25 23 39 25 38 25 31 08 37 26 31 36 40 15 31 26 16

Since that sequence had to be transformed into letters again to result in a human readable solution, it was necessary to apply the modulo function (with a divisor of 26) to these sums and to replace every 0 with a 26 (every letter 'Z' would get lost otherwise). The resulting sequence could then be turned into letters again by using the A1Z26 cipher in reverse:

14 05 24 20 18 05 04 05 03 15 04 05 20 08 05 18 05 19 20 22 05 05 12 08 19 13 17 05 22 17 23 01 16 13 25 23 13 25 12 25 05 08 11 26 05 10 14 15 05 26 16
 N  E  X  T  R  E  D  E  C  O  D  E  T  H  E  R  E  S  T  V  E  E  L  H  S  M  Q  E  V  Q  W  A  P  M  Y  W  M  Y  L  Y  E  H  K  Z  E  J  N  O  E  Z  P

This last step left the players with a message, NEXT REDECODE THE REST, and another layer of the same type of cipher: VEELHSMQEVQWAPMYWMYLYEHKZEJNOEZP

Since the new ciphertext was shorter, the players couldn't use all of the numbers from one to twelve written out after one another. The deciphering process would only work when removing one written out number at a time, starting from the left until the lengths matched again. The resulting set of strings is the first step towards solving the second layer of the cipher:

VEELHSMQEVQWAPMYWMYLYEHKZEJNOEZP
SIXSEVENEIGHTNINETENELEVENTWELVE

This whole process had to be repeated for each of the four layers until there was no additional ciphertext left after the last message. The layered ciphers resulted in these four messages:

1. NEXTREDECODETHEREST
2. ONCEMORE
3. ONEMOREAGAIN
4. NOWYOUREDONE

Taking the first letter of every message spells out NOON, which is the final solution to this envelope's riddle.

Envelope #5

The fifth envelope was opened on the livestream of December 21st. It contained an incomplete QR Code with numbers and letters in the places of the missing pixels.

To complete the QR Code, the players had to consider the solutions from the previous Envelopes #1, #2, #3 and #4:

1. THERE IS A CANVAS WITH TWO FACES
2. SEVEN
3. 102
4. NOON

The solution to Envelope #1 contains a number, TWO, for which every letter (t, w, o) is present in the grid of the incomplete QR Code.
The QR Code grid also contains the numbers 7 and 102, which are the solutions of envelopes #2 and #3.
NOON, the solution to Envelope #4, can be interpreted as the number 12, which is also present in the grid of missing pixels.

Marking each missing pixel that contains t, w, o, 7, 102, 12 in black and leaving the rest white completed the QR Code. Scanning the completed QR-Code then led to a page that redirects to https://netwatch-ncpd.com/archives/.