CyberEvilCorp — Digital Cyber Security Hackathon 2023 — Online Qualifier

The Online Qualifier for Digital Cyber Security Hackathon 2023 provided an intriguing test of open source intelligence (OSINT) skills.

Competitors were given an AI-generated image and a username, “@evilseeker” and a company name “CyberEvilCorp”, then tasked with using these clues to find the hidden flag. This medium article walks through my investigative approach to tracking down the breadcrumbs and ultimately retrieving the flag.

The challenge image itself offered little value, containing distorted text not very readable. But running the file through ExifTool revealed key metadata attached — the username “@evilseeker” and company name “CyberEvilCorp” were confirmed.

With the first solid leads in hand, I turned to search engines to see what I could find about the username and this CyberEvilCorp. Initial searched on Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing unfortunately yielded no results.

I decided to try my luck with Yandex, a Russian search engine sometimes known to surface different results. a search for “@evilseeker” returned a video URL on the platform Asciinema.

Upon clicking that link I saw this video that led to another link.

I eagerly clicked the link, hoping I was on the verge of flag discovery. But instead I was greeted with a 404 error, indicating the video page no longer existed. A dead end? Not so fast. I hypothesized the page may have existed previously and turned to the Wayback Machine Internet Archive for potential clues.

Bingo — the Wayback Machine had an archived copy of the Asciinema page from september. Navigating to the archived version revealed the full video, and more importantly displayed the flag when played back.

That was it.

~ theAce OUT!