swampCTF 2025 - OSINT challenges

Introduction

I have solved all 3 of the 3 OSINT tasks. More info about this CTF is here

Also check out my blog, I also posted writeup there - swampCTF 2025 - OSINT challenges | ManFcG

Table of contents

• Party Time!
• Party Time! Level 2
• On Thin Ice

Party Time!

It was a simple challenge - and I've got first blood on it! The goal was to find a location from a photo. To solve this challange I simply extracted the metadata, and made it flag with it (the syntax was given to us in the challange description).

I used exiftool to check metadata in this photo:

And after conversion from degrees-minutes-seconds (DMS) notation to decimal degrees (DD) notation I could use this data to form the flag.

swampCTF{29.652867,82.333244}

The real coordinates were 29.652867 -82.333244, but the flag format did not include a minus sign

Party Time! Level 2

This was also a simple challenge, but I took the hint because I wanted to know exactly where to expect the flag. To do this challange I had to know where the location was from the first challange named Party Time!. The goal was to find a location of nearest fast food. To solve this challange I went on google maps and started looking around for the nearest fast food place, the moment I spotted several of them I used that hint I mentioned earlier - it also gave me valuable advice "The reviews love the racecar fast service." , after looking at Checkers fast food I went into the reviews and sorted them from the newest. Scrolling down a bit I noticed a flag

And when I went to Checkers reviews:

swampCTF{Checkers_Yum}

On Thin Ice

This challenge was a bit harder. The description told me to search for a well rated rink and in addition there was a downloadable attachment that included a dark photo.

I did exiftool on this photo and I noticed something interesting

Description and title contain hexadecimal characters, I decoded them with Python

import binascii
hex_string = "D3A6D0BAD0BCD18BD181D3A7D0B420D0B2D0BED181D18CD0BAD0BED0B22E20D09CD0B5D0B7D0B4D0BBD183D0BD2E"
decoded_text = bytes.fromhex(hex_string).decode("utf-8", errors="ignore")
print(decoded_text)

The output was: Ӧкмысӧд воськов. Мездлун.

I used Google Translator to translate it into English, the translated text is "Step eight. Freedom." After quick google, I found out that this is a mission from Call of Duty: Black Ops

After scrolling down a bit, I also noticed the location of this mission

After going to Google Maps and typing "Vorkuta ice rink" in the search bar I found an ice rink, when I looked at reviews, I found the flag as the account name.

swampCTF{ForUM4sOnN0tForM3}