WebWitch walks us through how they would solve the Summer Camp 2020 – Open Source Intelligence challenge: 1-2-3 Words. OSINT Pro Tip: There are no dumb questions!
Challenge Question:
1) Where will the drop happen at?
Once you hit the right keywords, this challenge takes less time to finish than it took me to stage a fake cafe in my backyard.
As always, let’s start with the challenge metadata — and by metadata I mean the title, questions. This is an OSINT question, which probably means that you’re going to end up doing a lot of googling. The questions and the preamble make it pretty clear that you’re going to be looking for some kind of location data, so that will be your first step.
Once you look at the image, you’ll probably focus in on the two messages that stand out:
///thinkers.fortified.implanted ///cakes.shuttled.switch
Both have a very specific format, and if you don’t know what it is already, it’s a little tricky to find. Searching for “three words separated by periods” gives you a digital album on bandcamp, “///” will give you your computer files, and any combination of the words in the text will give you arbitrarily useless results. What gives?
The last thing you may think of trying is literally searching for “3 words” but lo’ and behold, that’s where your answer lies.
The trick to OSINT is realizing that there’s no dumb questions and even the most basic pieces of information can be important.
Happy Hacking!
CryptoKait 