About CyberSoc
The Cyber Investigator CTF was created by Jack Tilson of Cyber Society at Cardiff University. There are over 30 free & predominantly OSINT-based challenges drawing from a range of scenarios, putting your analytical skills to the test!
faultycassette
This OSINT challenge is from the section Signals Intelligence and is worth 500 points.
Task
As part of an investigation into an individual we believe is responsible for a slew of email threats directed at senior politicians, we have been digging up boxes of evidence from various forests around the UK.
From a few feet beneath Grizedale forest, we’ve recovered a cassette tape that when played, has what sounds like some unrecognisable speech. We don’t know who it is or what they’re saying.
It isn’t clear what the suspect was doing with this, or whether they intended for us to find it.
Are you able to identify who is in the recording for us? I’ve attached a digital copy of the tape.
Note: you’ve only got 3 attempts so refrain from just guessing!
Expected flag format: firstName(space)lastName
For completing this challenge, the audio file cassette_recording.wav is provided as download.
Solution
I have used Audacity to complete this challenge. After listening to the audio recording, it looks in the first place if the person in the recording is talking in the Russian language. After listening again, I start to notice that the recording is not in the Russian language, but that it was played back in reverse. So, I used Effect –> Reverse option in Audacity to reverse the audio.
After this step, I could now clearly hear sentences in the English language with a British accent. I can now clearly hear a male person uttering the following sentences: When I walked in there, there were 18,000 people waiting over a year for their operation. Today it’s just 800. Too many. Still too long. But our NHS is a national treasure – and one whose staff perform miracles as I’ve seen every day. And we’ve strengthened our nation’s defences, with submarines, destroyers, frigates and, soon, aircraft carriers, rolling out of our shipyards to keep our country safe in a dangerous world.
Who is this person? The easiest way is to search online for portions of the text. I quickly came across an article from The Spectator. It was the farewell speech by David Cameron that he delivered on July 13, 2016, at Downing Street in London.
The flag: David Cameron
I needed one attempt out of three to solve this challenge :-)