Corvus

Corvus
Active since 2017-01-01
It's stars, you fools.
Type	Independent
Creator	Unknown
Discovered	2017-01-01

Main Page > List of Investigations

Corvus is an ARG that began with secrets hidden within a VR game studio's promotional images.

Subreality Studios

A gallery of secrets

The VR game studio Subreality Studios posted a reddit thread promoting their new Discord server and linking to an Imgur gallery containing screenshots of their currently released games. Small letters were hidden in these images, spelling out /a/8nLqb.

This was another Imgur gallery link, depicting the constellation of Corvus.

Users investigating the ARG in the Subreality Discord server were given a special Corvus role, allowing them into a private #corvus channel. Three messages have been posted by the Mee6 Discord bot to that channel.

	Mee6 BOT 01/01/2017 at 5:01 AM
	=Unch5mb1R3c1NGI1RWdwBXYsxWZgUnbhRXQ d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e

	Mee6 BOT 01/01/2017 at 6:00 PM
	c50267b906a652f2142cfab006e215c9f6fdc8a01c27680133b781cadd037e8a6dcc001b

=Unch5mb1R3c1NGI1RWdwBXYsxWZgUnbhRXQ, when reversed, decodes from Base64 to Atanu ellappudu custunnaru, which is Telugu and translates roughly to "he always watches".

d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e is the MD5 hash of an empty string.

In my sights

	Mee6 BOT 01/01/2017 at 9:41 PM
	c50267b906a652f2142cfab006e215c9f6fdc8a01c27680133b781cadd037e8a6dcc001b

c50267b906a652f2142cfab006e215c9f6fdc8a01c27680133b781cadd037e8a6dcc001b is concatenation of a 40 character string c50267b906a652f2142cfab006e215c9f6fdc8a0 and the 32-character string 1c27680133b781cadd037e8a6dcc001b. The first one is the SHA-1 hash of www and the second – the MD5 hash of sniper, leading to http://subrealitystudios.com/sniper/ on the Subreality Studios website.

Sniped

The /sniper page contained an embedded Imgur image that has yet to be solved.

6c6f7462

After a few more days, the mee6 bot posted another message:

150164164160163072057057167167167056171157165
164165142145056143157155057167141164143
150077166075120166112130132165121163114155101

This was found to be octal, and led to a YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvJXZuQsLmA. The description of the video contains the same Telugu phrase as before, "Atanu ellappuḍū cūstunnāru." Within the video there is a postit note on a door, which seems to have more words:

The larger word above turned out to be in a language called Gurmukhi; the word is ਖਾਲੀ, and means "empty," according to Discord user taru.

Sunbaked and crowscalling

At this point, Discord users Jeppevinkel and jumpre discovered that there were two more pages added to the Subreality Studios website. Jeppevinkel discovered http://subrealitystudios.com/sunbaked/, which contains a pixelated image of a red herring, implying that it is a dead end. Jumpre discovered the page http://subrealitystudios.com/crowscalling/, which contains the image of a text message conversation and a hash:

ca73ab65568cd125c2d27a22bbd9e863c10b675d3d637fc604995b51a048db0058a7c210e57a38ccbbccdf2efb33b52e6c9d0a14dd70b2d415fbea6e0e8a3ad980ec179856012b7eecf4327e99cd44cd

This hash has yet to be solved.

Account

Discord user jumpre discovered that one of the hashes we found was a password for a google account, and the username was the account that posted the video before:

username: 6c6f7462
password: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e

The only thing of note within this account is a single email draft, which contains the hash:

e09315fa02d775f3e707a7af455093a1c240583b