OSINT Challenges – Cohesion Writeup

These are the writeups for OSINT Challenges of the Cohesion CTF by IEEE NCU.

1. Find The Place

Here we got an image as an attachment to the challenge, let’s look at that image

So in this challenge, you would have to reverse search the image and find the destination name which is also the name of a “country” and wrap the flag in the flag format.

After reverse searching the image on Yandex, you will get the answer as “Montserrat”. Just wrap the text around the flag format –> cohesion.ctf{Montserrat} will be the solution.

2. Time Travel

This was one of the trickiest challenges out there, here you have to read the description very carefully and break those points to search.

It says that a hacker named “Elliot Poulsen” who always speaks in hacker language that is often “Leetspeak”

After converting the name to leetspeak you will get –>311107 P0U153N. Now as this is a big name, break it into parts and search on social media websites. But since the name “Elliot” is also common try to search for Poulsen. After searching them through Twitter you will encounter 2 accounts that have the same name but one of them is fake.

After finding this account and seeing the retweets you will release the challenge name which is “Time Travel” This is also a hint and let’s check the Wayback Machine to see if we can find anything there.

You will get to know about a snapshot that has some weird kind of encryption is there.

After spending some time you will get to know that it is encrypted in base85 after decrypting the text you will get the flag–> ieeencu.ctf{b3st_h4cker_0f_4ll_7ime}

3. Who Am I

This challenge states of the author work for an organization. If you simply google MeuSec who are the education partners and CTF developers of this event you will get to know about me and this challenge has no relation to the author which means you only have to look at the Social media accounts of Meusec.

After taking some time you will get to know about Instagram for Meusec. After looking at the comment section of the recent posts you will get to know about a Pastebin link is there which has another question rather a riddle.

After some time of googling you will get to know the answer for this is Ariana Grande Butera. After wrapping it in the flag format –> cohesion.ctf{Ariana_Grande_Butera}

4. Easy-Peasy

It was probably one of the most straightforward challenges here we had to use shodan OSINT to solve this challenge.

After querying in shodan according to this question you will get an IP after wrapping it in the flag format –> cohesion.ctf{188.95.7.114}

5. OSINT Master

This was fairly a straight forward challenge, you were given a MAC(BSSID) and a was expected to enter an SSID as an answer, So here we use Wigle’s advanced query to get the answer for us.

As we can see here AndroidAP is the flag. cohesion.ctf{AndroidAP}.

6. Lost Phone

Here We get some resource files let’s look at them.

MCC-234
MNC-30
LAC: 10801
CID: 2626567

This information was there in the resource file after knowing the full forms and what they are you can easily solve this challenge on the OpenCell Id website.

After entering the details there you will get the flag

As we can see that we go the Lattitude and Longitude we just have to put them inside the flag format according to the challenge description. Flag –> cohesion.ctf{51.49,-0.08}

7. Storms

This challenge consisted of some rabbit holes like the Exif data, but it was a fairly simple one. Let’s look at the picture which was provided.

This looks like a world map with a line over Mumbai what could it possibly be? Well as the challenge name suggests It is some storm. Could you tell me which storm hit India recently? Well, It was the storm Nisarga.

For knowing the exact date and time there is a website called zoom.earth. There you go to 3 May 2020 and look at which time the picture was taken after some time you will get to know that 3 pm was the time. Now just wrap the text in proper format and you are done. cohesion.ctf{03_06_2020_15}

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