SpookyCTF'23: Don’t stick me there!

I woke up after a night out and I'm hurting uh... everywhere... I think I left my phone at one of the bars we were at last night. Thankfully, I was able to see the last photo I took through the cloud.

Can you help me find my phone? I need to know the name of the bar and when the photo was taken.

flagformat: NICC{Bar_Name-HH:MM:SS}

This was a simple forensics challenge. We are given a photo and we have to find out the name of the bar and the time the photo was taken.

Analysing the File

Doing a quick exiftool gave us a bunch of metadata.

kairos@pop-os:~/Downloads$ exiftool lastphoto.png > info.txt

Getting the Time

Scrolling through info.txt, searching up the Create Date would give the exact date and time the photo was taken.

Create Date                     : 2023:08:13 03:47:12.948-04:00
Date/Time Original              : 2023:08:13 03:47:12.948-04:00
Modify Date                     : 2023:08:13 03:47:12-04:00

Here, the time is 03:47:12.

Getting the Location

Also from info.txt, there were GPS metadata from the image.

GPS Latitude                    : 40 deg 42' 33.02" N
GPS Longitude                   : 73 deg 56' 14.04" W

To search this location on Google Maps easily, we have to first change it from degrees minutes seconds to decimal degrees.

Using this website, we get the decimal degrees of the location: 40.709172, -73.937233

Searching it up on Google Maps, I could see the location the image was taken at:

Looking at the stores nearby, The Anchored Inn was the only one labelled as a bar (Bar & Grill).

Getting the Flag

Putting the name of the bar and the time the photo was taken into the flag format, we get the flag:

NICC{The_Anchored_Inn-03:47:12}