TraceLabs OSINT CTF

This weekend was my first time competing in TraceLab’s OSINT Searchparty, which is a CTF style event.

I wasn’t sure what to really expect going into it since I’ve never done one before. The event was brought up in the WGU Cyber Security Club so we actually had two different teams competing. I was the captain of my team devzero and the other team was called The Fowl Owls.

Tracelabs describes the event as

The Trace Labs Search Party CTF is a non theoretical, gamified effort that allows for the crowdsourcing of contestants to perform a single task: Conduct open source intelligence operations to help find missing persons.

A basic overview of the event is as follows:

1. All teams are given basic information about five missing persons: name, location they went missing, possible aliases/emails, picture.
2. The goal is to perform passive collection to gain as much information about these persons that might aid in building a bigger profile or help to find them.
3. There are no tradional CTF flags, all information gathered can be submitted individually with proof and a judge decides what category it fits into and awards points based on that category.
4. The team with the most flags at the end of the eight hours wins.

After the event is over TraceLabs takes the findings and builds reports for the law enforcement agencies that are in charge of the individual cases and provides all the information that was collected. Hopefully these reports help to find the missing persons.

Devzero ended up placing 91 out of 290 teams and The Fowl Owls ended up at 131.

It was a whole lot harder than I thought it would be but a lot of fun.
I definitley plan on being a part of the future events.