OSINT Challenge: CHUNKY BOI

For this challenge, there was no location in the EXIF data just as expected. Reverse image-search also did not yield any results, and unfortunately, the geospy tool that proved very useful for the previous challenge did not provide any valid data for solving this one.

The approach that worked for this challenge and was actually pretty easy to solve with, was to find a list of American airports by doing a google search for "list of American airports" and start loading them one by one on google maps.





With a quick glance it was pretty easy to tell if you were at the right airport or not as the environment, buildings and layout of each one of them differs significantly. Starting from the top of the list going down, within less than five minutes I was on the airport that looked a lot like the one in the photo - Seattle–Tacoma International Airport. Utilising google earth was a vital step in the process as we can use the "3D" view which helped to check the buildings for marking that are visible in the photo.



Zooming-in on the original photo posted for this challenge, we can see three buildings. One of them is marked with the letter "E" and the other one even though not very clear what the markings say, the positioning of the markings around the top-right corner of the building is very unique. When looking on the view 3D view from the google Earth website in the Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, we can see the same three buildings with two of them carrying the same markings.

The full coordinates for the Seattle–Tacoma International Airport are: 47.460164, -122.307111. Cutting out the last three digits as in the example provided in the challenge brief, leaves us with 47.460, -122.307. Finding the plane type was pretty easy by using a reverse image-search on the yandex platform and the Wiki name for that plane is "Boeing C-17 Globemaster III". Putting those two bits of information together gives us the full flag for this challenge which was: uiuctf{Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, 47.460, -122.307}.