OSINT quiz 2020: A fun way to start your OSINT journey!

While trying to reach the Ronin level on OSINTDojo, I need to create some writeups on solutions on OSINT quizzes I have completed. So, for today I am going to walk you through the first challenge of OSINTquiz 2020, an OSINT quiz created by sector035. This is the third of a series of OSINT quizzes made by sector035 and is supposedly the easiest of all. The other two were made back in 2019 and 2017. If you are still in the beginning of your OSINT journey, then I advise you to start on this one, then move backwards to the one of 2019 and lastly to 2017.

So, let’s go! To start the OSINT quiz of 2020, all you have to do is send an e-mail from any e-mail address with subject: “start” to this email address: osintquiz2020@gmail.com. Details on the quiz and how it is “played” will soon arrive and you will move on to perform a total of 18 challenges, until fully completing it. The whole process will run by sending answers and receiving new questions-challenges via e-mail. You can even request for hints along the way if you get stuck on any challenge! Now let’s move on to solving the first challenge of the quiz.

Question:

“On March 28, 2018 I (sector035) sent out a tweet, quoting a geolocation challenge by someone else. But what is the display name of the Twitter account that sent out this quiz?”

Answer:

We are going to use some twitter dorking - search techniques here. Head over to a twitter profile and insert the following to the search bar located at the top of your page:




Let’s analyze that a little bit:

“from:sector035” is used to find all tweets posted by the profile with username sector035
“until:2018-03-29” means look for every post made until 29 March 2018
“from: 2018-03-28” means look for every post made from 28 March 2018

This way we narrow down our search results to find the post of interest easier. Please note that there might be a time zone difference between you and sector035. This is why you should pick a day before and a day after in your search query. Indeed, scrolling a little bit down, we can see the post mentioned in the quiz:




The quoted tweet is mentioning an original tweet made by Rickey Gevers.

There is another way to do that, without using twitter dorks. Head over to the search bar on twitter again and search for anything e.g. sector035. Now look at the top-right of your screen. You should see something like that:




Click the “Advanced Search” button and input manually everything you want to filter in your search.




Now that we have a display name, let’s calculate the MD5 hash of it.

Note: During the quiz, you have to send your answer in MD5 hash format. Therefore, we must calculate the MD5 hash of the answer.

In order to do that, we will use md5hashgenerator which is a nice tool. We input the name there (after removing spaces and converting to lower case as the quiz instructs us to) and we get the following result:




First challenge completed!

Why don’t you also give it a go and try solving the rest of the challenges? Use the last tool to calculate the MD5 hash of your answers each time.

I hope you liked this writeup. Stay tuned for more!

Until next time, stay healthy!

Do you have a question/comment regarding this methodology? Please e-mail me at theinspector32@protonmail.com,or send me a message on twitter.

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