A bit tangential, but I found and contacted the author of Cicada3301 some years ago. They sloppily used a single Google Analytics ID on 2 sites, one of them being on an old version of the Cicada3301 site which had been snapshotted by archive.org before they realized their mistake and removed it. I was able to reverse search this ID and found it was also in use on the personal website of a cryptography/security expert who was the Chief Information Security Officer of a contractor who primarily does work for big three-letter agencies in the US. I contacted him on LinkedIn and he denied it, though I very much doubt this was some big coincidence.