I didn’t want this to be just another challenge, so I tried my best to keep it interesting throughout the stages. Otherwise, it could have become pretty boring. Here’s a writeup that explains my thought process while creating this challenge. Feel free to share any ideas or tips!

Italic Font resembles author’s thought while making stages.

Beginning.

As the description mentions “author” here means more than just a keyword. First stage includes performing an OSINT on the author who’s blackth0rns.

Solve

Intended solve includes going to 0bscuri7y’s linkedin page and finding author from there. After a bit of OSINT you should find me.

Here you get a string WdB1jUEtLf9qsaF3SsUJC2RBuNhrUteDKUJPFMApRhasKWpRRCvAMe9OYzyRu3zgJbReuL9LuErcYy5WWPN0k1rgMXUrpOBINCvEefOLHeFHNgziTXGZrMpRFATQMdeyHUIrwsz5EWrbY2F2PjDckKDyNgGoHzb2M25Vr2IIOf8=

You guys must be wondering why’d I use cryptography on a string in an osint chall. The answer is simple: I wanted you guys to learn about some simple cryptography encodings.

Now you need to decode this string:

After decoding the string we get:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j3P3sAMjv4Z0NaDSpKk9e7TwLBWA96riVvyqaK4e_U/edit?tab=t.0

This takes us to a Google document containing multiple usernames, from which you have to find the correct one and perform OSINT on it.

Distinct username includes:

Patient_Diamond2316
Patient_Diamond1632
Patient_Diamond1236
Patient_Diamond2163
Patient_Diamond2631
Patient_Diamond2613
Patient_Diamond2361

Yeah, I know there are a bunch of usernames — that’s how it is in real life. You don’t get everything handed to you; sometimes you have to brute-force things to find the right one.

Out of several ones Patient_Diamond2361 returns as a valid account. Here is the latest reddit post of that user:

Well here you get a code for a post which basically refers to an instagram post. https://www.instagram.com/p/DNP83nftRTK/

Here we see 2 users: metamorphosis_manga and metamorphosis_novel saying some stuff. So now you should do what a normal OSINT player would. Perform sherlock on the usernames.

Most of you guys were complaining of this stage to be NSFW related. Here’s my take:

I wanted to set a point of view through this stage. metamorphosis manga (about which ive heard from reddit and insta) has a very sad ending where girl kinda suicides. metamorphosis novel(also about which ive heard from reddit) has a very sad story which depicts how a man was treated throughout the story.

both of them has same name and their stories align with topic of bad influence emitted by society and how society made both of them drive mad.

So this message

metamorphosis_manga: you dont want to know metamorphosis_novel: youll eventually know

depicts that manga one is something which is so disturbing you dont want to know about it while novel depicts a story which you’ll know about in future because of the way society operates.

Running sherlock on metamorphosis_manga reveals it has a pastebin account along with 2 pastebin posts.

Decoding the string will lead us to discord.

https://discord.gg/vE69axXaeb

After joining discord you’ll see 2 channels #general and #whatisit

From #general you get a code of a png: 2kbvac.png and from #whatisit you get a hint: what do we call a cat full of boxes?? 🤔 Oh no wait it's box full of cats silly me (its a website)

Which clearly refers to https://catbox.moe/ and after playing around with it you’ll know that while checking the uploaded files we need to alter the website to https://files.catbox.moe/2kbvac.png to get the png. Which is a QR code:

Scanning this code will lead you to a telegram channel where you’ll find this message:

In conclusion, this message mainly refers to checking out a video from a channel named “PhoeNiXSP7”. And the name of video is Cuco playlist:

Which reveals another catbox link, consisting of a blurred out code:

Here you have to guess the code

I wanted to test y’all eyesight

and the code was : MJWGCY3UGA===

Past few stages has been nothing but wondering from one social media platform to another and that’s intentional coz i wanted you guys to know that most of the time while doing SOCINT we have to check social media handles alot!

After performing some searches on the username blact0 we get his pastebin account.

Here we get coordinates of a place: 28.6699053,77.193373 along with hint a restaurant which closes at 10:30 PM which refers to a restaurant named BIT and there you can read my review which leads us to another stage.

After analyzing the screenshot we can search for another username we just got musashi_the_one. And just a basic OSINT will lead you to the X (formerly known as twitter) handle of musashi_the_one user.

Now if you’ve been focusing on recent stages of this challenge, you’ll know that when we got musashi_the_ones username from previous stage we can see that they were talking about some AI stuff.. musashi_the_one: bro i couldn't understand it other: we studied AI together dude how can you not understand it. Yes, that was a hint. In this stage we get the code 6899c110-2de8-8010-81d0-6203517f8464 which belongs to some kind of AI and i think if you’re an AI nerd you’ll know just by looking at this that it’s a UUID which we get at the end of chatgpt conversation sharing link.

And so we get the link:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6899c110-2de8-8010-81d0-6203517f8464

which leads us to a conversation

Here we get another code dc3bfae33610 and another hint probably its your rival.. haha lets just not talk about it now have a good day

By rival and the length of code we got, you should know by now that I mean gemini here and after using that code to forge gemini share link you should get https://gemini.google.com/share/dc3bfae33610

Which leads you to the end of this challenge. 07CTF{b33n_4_l0ng_j0urn3y_1snt_it}

Thank you everyone!

I had fun making this challenge. Feel free to share your feedback!