It is the next morning, but I am still hyped up from last night’s OSINT CTF competition! My OSINT team and I had our most successful CTF to date, and we were even missing two players! Final scoreboard says we (Team NoBarkAllByte) came in 33rd place out of 143 teams!
The CTF targets were real missing people, and the contestants had to find data on these missing people using OSINT techniques. The contestants had to submit information which would be used by Law Enforcement in the actual investigation.
Team NoBarkAllByte did well because we focused on the previous locations of people (worth 500 points) instead of finding basic information about the subject such as habits, physical features, emails, etc. (worth somewhere between 50-150 points). My two favorite moments were:
1) When I found that one of the people traveled over 1,500 miles because they took a picture of their partner, uploaded it to Facebook, and it contained a shopping center sign in the background. Based on the stores on that sign, I was able to figure out the location of where that photo was taken.
2) One of the missing people uploaded a picture of a to-go meal they ate to Instagram, and I was able to read the grease wrapper to find the name of the restaurant. The restaurant was hundreds of miles from where the person disappeared, and since the restaurant doesn’t offer delivery, I concluded the missing person stopped there.
I had such a great time! Can’t wait for the next one! Great job team, you know who you are!