Road to Nowhere — Hacktoria Contract Walkthrough (Understanding OSINT)
Today we are solving, an amazing contract called, ‘Road to Nowhere’ which is available on Hacktoria.
So, Let’s begin solving Road to Nowhere!
Here is the description of the contract, I’ll advise you to read it carefully and take points of the important bits.
Don’t forget to download your Linkfile (zip file) for the contract.
Special Agent K, we’ll be needing your assistance on a geolocation matter. One of our clients, a medium sized European goverment agency, has requested we find a needle in a haystack.
Our client is involved in fighting terrorist groups in Asia and Africa. Recently, they gained access to a Dropbox account filled with map data. Most of these seem to be related to safe houses used by a terrorist organization called “The Meercats”. Indeed a strange name, but nontheless, they mean business.
After having located most safehouses, our client is still struggling to locate a few of them. Since the operation to take down all of these locations needs to be synchronized. There’s an urgent need to identify them all before the next phase can begin.
Below you find an image of what appears to be a village, with a red marker to indicate the exact location. It’s your assignment to find where in the world this is. Currently we have reason to believe this is in Africa or Asia. But, given the organizations’ widespread members, this is only a guess at this time.
Use the coordinates you find as the password to open the ZIP archive. Inside, you find the linkfile to your Contract Card as always. Also, we heard the number 1920 is of importance in this case…
As always. Special Agent K, the contract is yours, if you choose to accept.Our mission as stated in the description below is to find where in the world this location is (marked by the red target on the image below) and use it as our password to open the linkfile, extract the bit.ly link and get our contract card.
From the description, we can conclude that the terrorist organization called ‘The Meercats’ are located somewhere in Africa, and the number 1920 is of great importance.
So, I started with searching the image on Yandex Image Search and Google Images. But nothing came up. So, I tried a different approach of using a tool called ‘steghide’, to check whether there is something hidden in it or not.
Steghide is available by default on Kali Linux, but you can also download it to other operating systems or you can also use stenography tools available online.
Type the following command in your terminal, use steghide ,and as for the passphrase use “1920”.
steghide extract -sf road-to-nowhere-challenge.jpg
Looks like, we have a file called location.txt.
In that file, the following coordinates of the location is given: ‘20.899370,95.118041,16". Now use the coordinates to open the linkfile.zip and the mission will be completed and you will be rewarded a contract card like this:
I wish you all happy hacking for the future :)
