Spectrum
Scenario
Scotland yard have intercepted information about one of the biggest drug deals to go down in the city of London. Someone we believe is linked to the deal was arrested. The only item they had in their possession was a USB thumb drive. Unfortunately, one of our junior analysts was unable to find anything of interest. Before we let this suspect go, we would like one of our DF experts to see if they can find anything about the deal before it goes down. Can you find out where and when the deal is expected to go down?
Note: Once you have the coordinates, you can use https://www.gps-coordinates.net/ to view the location.
Solution
-
What time is the meeting happening? (4 points)
First I mount the
image.dd
file to the/mnt
directory:sudo mount -o loop image.dd /mnt
This gives us a
photos
folder and an archive namednoise_samples.zip
. Runningexiftool
on the photos gives us the following information of interest:$ exiftool photos/Millenium\ Bridge.jpg Location : name of the challenge $ exiftool photos/london_bridge.jpeg Artist : steghide password: cheese on toast
The password is
cheese on toast
. Runningsteghide
to extract the hidden information didn't work with that password on any of the three images, nor did an empty password.Instead of focusing on the images, I decided to look into the audio files. The archive is password protected, but we are able to break the encryption using
fcrackzip
:sudo apt install fcrackzip fcrackzip -u -D -p /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt noise_samples.zip
The found password is
garfield
. Trying on the various audio files landed a hit withwhite.wav
, extracting data to a file namedstardate.txt
. The file contains what appears to be an encoded string:56inrkS7AcAXatqrFM
. Using CyberChef with various encodings yielded a time with Base58:15:01:00 emit
This didn't work, and the "emit" portion was strange anyways. Adding a reverse transformation got us the true time of the meeting:
time 00:10:51
-
What are the supposed coordinates for the deal? (4 points)
Decoding the Morse code in the
location.wav
file with morsecode.world gives us a dead end:N I C E T R Y N O T H I N G T O H E A R H E R E !
We do have one clue, which is the name of the challenge from earlier. At first I thought
Spectrum
was a place, since that was the location, but then I realized that it was likely in reference to the spectrum of the audio files.Clicking the track name of the
white.wav
file then selecting "Spectogram" gives us some interesting results:So we have the coordinates:
51.505278° N, 0.055278° W
. -
Looking into these coordinates, what is the name of this location? (2 points)
We can search the coordinates on the given site, and "London City Airport" is returned.