Link to the CTF itself
Extraterrestrial CTF
Type
OSINT
Challenge
As an Open Source Intelligence analyst, you have been tasked with locating Activia Productions' project manager and recruiter, Khalil Askerman, who disappeared shortly after leaving for a company sponsored trip. According to family and friends, Khalil was a loveable guy who enjoyed the little things in life like going to Waffle House at 2 A.M after a night of wearing out the company credit card with clients on scented dry erase markers and LonelyFans. Can you assist Activia Productions in finding their missing project manager?
SPOLERS AHEAD!
If you intend to do this CTF challenge, stop here. While I will omit the flag, you will still miss out on the fun.
Flag
HTB{REDACTED}
Solution
Khalil Askermans only social media is his Linkedin account, which has a recruiting post containing his email kaskerman@gmail.com.
A Gmail account. This is the starting point.
Add Askermans email to a Gmail address book (I had to take help from the official walkthrough for this step to get started - good learning as I was thinking in completely other directions instead and would likely not have come to this on my own!)
After adding the email in the address book, take a look in the source and grab his Google ID by searching for the email.
Next, go to https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/[google-id] (https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/117647265639144151717) Browse through his reviews, the top one has a Base64 string and immediately calls for attention.
Use tool of choice to decode the string, I used Cyberchef in this case. Turns out the flag was in the string and there were no more steps, which made this really short, but still very fun!
This is a good CTF (capture the flag) for beginners to get into OSINT (open source intelligence) before moving on to more complex challenges.
