I participated in JerseyCTF IV with **Students Taking Flags United** and we achieved 3rd place in students division! Thanks all the bigbig carrying me!!!!!

**Where-is-it: `jctf{not_a_real_place}` (first blood)**

We have a image file, when I try to `strings` it it contains some txt file inside, so I use `binwalk -e` instead and we obtain a zip file and that zip file contains the required txt file. The flag lies inside it.

**subsistute-details-torrent: `jctf{https://www.NTFS/File/Metadata}`**

We have a .wim file, after downloading this I directly try to `string` it and the flag lies in it.

**living on the edge: `jctf{3dg3_0f_y0ur_s3at}`**

We have a .vmem file, that we could open it with volatility3. The challenges name **edge** hint us that we should look for edge process. When we dump the process out we could directly grep for jctf and we found the flag.

**advised-on-a-novel-idea: `jctf{Mishra_Pan_9783031464782_Dutt}`**

> I'm pretty bummed. I thought I came up with a novel way of **backdooring your brain using AI**, but somebody beat me to it last month! Even worse - they're claiming a **100% attack success rate with this Trojan attack**!
> I looked into this guy, and he's pretty solid... **been winning awards for 21 years now**! His partner isn't a slouch either - in fact I think the duo just **wrote a book together**. Pretty cool considering that the **primary author served as his advisor for his co-author's dissertation**.
> I need to learn what the primary author knows, but I also have a bad memory. Can you give me the last names of each of the authors. Also, can you find the last book he wrote's ISBN (hardcover, please) and then tell me who he learned from while getting his PhD? **I heard it was someone who runs their own lab**, too, back at his alma mater. His old teacher was his advisor for his dissertation - so you know they know something great - I just can't find them myself. If you get me his teacher/advisor's last name I'll track them down.
> It's either I learn now, or hope I wait a couple of decades to use what their tech... and who knows where tech will be by then?

We are given a long description in the challenge which hint us along the osint journey. There are important keywords that I bold the text above.

First, if we search **backdooring brain using AI with Trojan attack**, There is an essay from University of Florida attracted my attention. The authors of this essay are **Zhixin Pan** and **Prabhat Mishra**. It quite matches with the above description that author and coauthor stuff.

Then, For like half a day we are osinting Zhixin Pan since his name always come first in few essays that written by him and Prabhat Mishra. For a long time we thought Zhixin Pan was the main author. However the main author is actually Mishra and Pan is the co-author.

If we try to investigate all along with Pan, you will found something suspicious that make you doubt ur work. For example, Zhixin was so young that he obtain his bachlor degree in 2015, which makes his age only around 22+9 = 31. Remember the description said he won awards for 21 years? It might be a little bit too young for him to win that awards. Moreover, Mishra obtained his PHD at 2004, It is a bit difficult to believe that Pan can be the advisor of Mishra for the dissertion...

After giving up on Pan, we try to gather more information about Mishra and now everything matches the description. He did publushed some books, and is the advisor of Pan for dissertion, and winning awards since 21 years ago and have his own lab. It was trivial to find the ISBN of the book and his teacher.

**what council: `jctf{q_r_pr3tty_g00d_a7_th15_h||h}`**

> Remember that image file from sticky situation?
>
> We had a witness come forward saying they saw the suspect leaving Cullimore's basement - right where we found the laptop.
>
> Not sure if what they're saying is useful or true, but they claim the suspect was muttering something about 'The Council'.
>
> Who's the council?
>
> You still have that ad1, right?
>
> If not: go get it. You're going to need it.
>
> If memory serves me right, there was a flyer around campus talking about the council a while back. Maybe it's that?

I accidentally solve this when I was doing the another ad1 chal (since they are using the same file). In initially attempt I tried to open the **MeetTheCouncil.png** file in the desktop but the file is corrupted. If you try to use `xxd` to see the hex you can only see something like `....h.i.....`. And there is no more clue for me to solve it. So for a long time we did not spend time on it and focusing the another chal.

However, Macbook have a strong search function that kind of let u grep the content directl. So When I tried to search for some keywords, such as `flag`,`jctf`,`mail`,etc. The result returns when searching `mail` is interesting. We successfully obtained the mailbox from Dr. Tom, which we could see the mail he sent previously. There is an email which the content is base64 encoded, after decoding we get a png file.


It is an obstructed QR Code! We put it on QrazyBox and after some eyes-damaging correcting we get the flag.

**cyber daddy: `jctf{1_l0v3_ram3n_gam1_and_stat3_secr3t5}`**
> We're still trying to figure out who tom's new friend is. Did you dig into them from the forums? They honestly look familiar... and kind of cute.
>
> Think we can find the flag from him?

Another accident solve when trying others osint challenge. When we are trying the-internet-is-forever, from the ad1 file (the one I mentioned above), we can see the receiver of the mail and some forwarded email and one of it is from [e-mail]. We found his ig, github, and twitter. In instragram we saw him interact a lot with another instagram account `@megamegzthe1337`, the flag lies in one of her post. I have actually no idea which chal does this flag belongs to but just randomly click on one osint chal and success.

**Conclusion**

These are the challenges I solved, Thanks for reading! There are some OSINT challenges me and vow are so so so close to solve it... it would bring us an extra 3k+ points if we didnt miss those silly things. And my burp dont know why fail to access web chals. Still getting improvement from every CTF I have participated and that encorage me to keep doing it. It was a fun CTF and its quite beginners fridenly overall.