OSINT: Learning by Doing. A walkthrough of The Seint's OSINT Puzzles - PART 4

This is the final part of my walkthrough of an OSINT CTF set by The Seint in a GitHub repo you can find here. So far, each subsequent step is nested inside a zip archive that is unlocked by solving the previous step. Each layer is password protected, the password being an MD5 hash of the previous stage's answer. You can fins the beginning of the series here.

WARNING: Obviously there are spoilers in this series; they are a walkthrough after all!

STEP 6 - It's Over Now...

Opening step6.zip, we find the usual contents...

• step6.txt
• step6 - hint.txt
• step7.zip

As before, we'll try getting through this without a hint, and in step6.txt we have our clue:

This is the last step of this trip around the world. The title of this quiz contains a part of the album name, recorded by a band from a Northern-European country. This band recorded a very popular song in 1990. However, this recording was a slightly changed version of the same song recorded back in 1987. In the lyrics, only one word is different in these two songs. The word we are looking for is this one from the first version of the song.
The password is the MD5 hash of the word.

I had a vague recollection of the CTF's title, but headed back to the repo to be sure. The title is "OSINT puzzles from Hotelrooms and other strange places," but sadly this didn't ring any bells for me in terms of an album name. So it was off to Google, and use of the site: operator to check out the encyclopedia for discography:

site:discogs.com from Hotelrooms and other strange places

Sure enough, this brought me to Roxette's album "Tourism: Songs from Studios, Stages, Hotelrooms & Other Strange Places" (including the odd spelling of 'hotelrooms'). Roxette didn't really make it onto my radar in the early 90's, but a quick look at the track listing offers up one track most people who had a radio at that time will remember: "It Must Have Been Love".

A quick look at the Singles Discography for Roxette confirmed the single was released in 1990, as suggested by the clue. But what was this about an earlier version and a change of lyrics?

Thanks to the mention of lyrics, I went off to check on a couple of lyrics databases for any clues. Thankfully, both Genius and AZLyrics were happy to help:

“It Must Have Been Love” was originally released as “It Must Have Been Love (Christmas For The Broken Hearted)“ in 1987 and it became a Top 10 hit in Sweden. [Genius]

When released for the first time in December of 1987, this song was titled "It Must Have Been Love (Christmas for the Broken Hearted)". This version was included on the re-release of their 1986 album "Pearls of Passion" in 1997. An edited version of "It Must Have Been Love" ("Christmas day" has been changed to "winter's day") was featured in the 1990 film "Pretty Woman" and was included on the film's soundtrack. This version became Roxette's third number-one hit in the USA. [AZLyrics]

So that pretty much clears up the mystery, gives us a bit of interesting trivia, and the word for Cyberchef. Now we can open step7.zip and read a congratulatory message from The Seint:

You reached the end of this quiz and this trip around the world. I hope you enjoyed the OSINT and geolocation tasks. Thank you for being a part of this journey! There is more to come.
If you like this quiz, please share it with your friends!
@SEINT_pl

We also get a little Easter Egg, which I'll leave for the reader to discover.

Many thanks to The Seint for putting on this CTF -- it's a fun set of puzzles that will get you to dig into Search and Google Maps, which are fundamental to a grounding in OSINT.

Want to read the whole series? Start with Part 1 here.