Jules Lewis

This is a walkthrough of an OSINT CTF set by The SEINT in a GitHub repo you can find here . Unless there are any surprises later on, each stage is nested inside a zip archive that is unlocked by solving the previous stage ( like a matryoshka doll, hence the cover image ). Each layer is password protected, the password being an MD5 hash of the previous stage's answer. You can see how we solved Step 1 in my previous post .  WARNING: Obviously there are spoilers in this series; they are a walkthrough after all! STEP 2 - The Day The Music Died Opening step2.zip, we find two text files: - step2.txt - step2 - hint.txt Let's see how we get on without the hint, shall we? Opening step2.txt, we find a 'treasure hunt' style of clue: --- The name of the place from the previous task is a name of a song by American singer and songwriter. The lyrics mention something that happened several years before the song was released. In the place the lyrics refer to, there is a little structure...

We all have different learning styles. I'm one of those people who learns best by looking over someone's shoulder while they're doing the thing I want to learn. I don't need to be physically looking over their shoulder; a video or written walkthrough works just as well. This is largely how I learned OSINT, by reading and watching other people do it. Over the years I've become more and more convinced that to be good at OSINT, you need a lot more that a reliance on tools. There is a seemingly infinite collection of OSINT tools on the web, and I have given up many attempts to collect and curate them ( others have done a much better job, see footnotes below ). Many tools work really well and might still be working in month or two when you need them again. On the other hand, with the endless updates to many of our favourite sources of information, especially social media sites, APIs get altered and the tools that rely on them start to to break. You can find a lot of dead...