My first Trace labs CTF

Today was the day, I woke up at 0730 had my coffee and checked my email, what did I find, another confirmation email from Human Decoded which was probably 4 in the past 2 weeks. Once you sign up for Trace Labs search party your in and they wont let you forget.

But anyways as the time ticked by and my nerves were crawling higher and higher with the more Osint content consumed all I could do was wait. One hour before the briefing the B7o0dh0und5 met on discord to see what everyone was thinking. It was really fun and cool because we had never met and only one of us had done a TL ctf, most of our team was from the US but we had 1 foreigner which is always good.

After the our meeting we had the 1 hour mandatory brief, basically summed up what Trace labs is doing is pretty awesome and also DO NOT try to password reset anyone else accounts, TL is completely passive recon.

After the briefing it was on….so I thought until i realized i couldn’t remember my account sign on, maybe its because I have 100 different emails and now im adding sock puppets to the mix so after 10 mins of wasted time I got back in to the search party platform.

From here for the next 4 hours we worked and dug and honestly had a pretty rough time finding info that was creditable, which was extremely important and we didn’t just submit 100 pictures or 100 coworkers. So we found some social profiles, news articles and employment stuff. And as we ran up against walls we would try another person. Overall we had 6 missing people cases to work on some were new some were older so there was times that accounts may have been deactivated so plan for that to.

‘After the 4 hours were up and we were all thoroughly beat, our flags were in and than we waited for the results. Did we win? Oh no not even close!

But we did win a whole lot of knowledge and I think we won some confidence. If your reading this while waiting for a CTF to stat like I would be, I would suggest making sure you have your tools in order and a plan on how to deploy those.

But thank you to TL for the badge, Im not sure if our whole team will be back next time but I know I will be!

Until next time

R3ap3rd0g