BAUCTFv1 OSINT/orosin official write up

Hello You.

Challenge Description

For some reason this challenge got zero solves :(

Now let’s get our hands dirty…

From the poem, you might think that I want you to search for the author of the poem but it is AI generated (It’s just for trolling, guys C’mon)

zeroGPT

knowing that and after reading the poem you should understand that it is talking about someone which is `عثمان سيشا` which I also focused on in the hint.

If you start looking for his name in Arabic you will get no result and you will fall down the rabbit hole. So, if you’ve considered searching for his name in English, that would be the right move

now searching for Usman Sisha will yield nothing useful and you’ll find that no one has that name, but google search gives you a hint to search for the correct name which is more popular

Here if you keep digging you will find a twitter account with the username usmanshisha

:3

There is only two posts and there is a wired link if you try to open that link on your normal browser you’ll find that it doesn’t exists and that is because it is a tor link

You don’t have to worry about it though ;)

Tor from brave

Oh great, it is a ZeroBin which something similar to PasteBin but on the dark net, here you can see that the data is encrypted, if you refresh the page it will ask you for a password.

Now we need to start looking for the password…

Going back the the twitter account, there is nothing except the link that would attract your eyes (+ we have no other leads), the account is the only thing that we have.

One of the thoughts that may come to mind is that the user usmanshisha might have posted something and then deleted it. We can use the wayback machine to check if there is a record for that account or not

Doing so we can see that there is a record in 2023 of that account, if you go and check that snapshot, you’ll find that usmanshisha has posted something to his brother Muhammad Sumbul

and here you will find this text:

Unlock the gates with the passphrase: WinterIsComing, my brother Sumbul. If you discover this secret, you’re truly my kin. This tweet shall vanish upon your success.

from here we go back to ZeroBin and we get the flag

BAU{y0u_kn0w_n0th1n6_j0n_5n0w_:3}

And that is the story of an easy challenge that was turned into a broken challenge because of a poem lol