The Mechanical Bird’s Nest

Today on our OSINT challenges, along with the above flavourtext, we are given the following image:

From both the flavourtext and the image, I pick up the following details:

• Our location is in a desert.
• Its in a “fortress”, so most likely a well protected location.
• The flag format uses Latitude and Longitude to three decimal places.
• The “pin” tells me that its a Google Maps location, so any metadata regarding location is kinda gonna be useless.

After noting this down, the first thing I usually do is a reverse image search using Google Images. Instantly, the first hit that I get is for Area 51. So, I hop onto Google Maps and search up Area 51. Its in the middle of the desert, so it matches our first dot point. It also matches our fortress hint, as Area 51 is famously a bit difficult to get into to say the least.

Google Maps time!

Now that I know the rough location of our image, I hop onto Google Maps and start having a bit of a look around. I know that I’m looking for a helipad, but I also take note of the small building to the left of the landing pad. After looking around for a bit, I get the following visual match:

Here’s the actual Google Maps Pin if anyone wants to have a look.

Now I just have to pop the pin on the helicopter and we’ve got the flag!

Flag: HTB{37.247_-115.812}