CTF Challenge Walkthrough: File Metadata
This is the second in my series of cyber competition challenge walkthroughs. As I’ve mentioned previously, Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions are not just fun but also an excellent way to learn. In this post, we will step through finding metadata (data about data) in a file I created called dollz.jpg.
The challenge questions were:
- What was the make of the camera?
- What was the camera model name?
- What city was the picture taken in?
- When was the picture taken?
My analysis environment is a Kali Linux virtual machine.
Based on what was covered in my first CTF Challenge Walkthrough, we should start by determining what type of file we are actually dealing with here, which we will do by using the Linux file command, output shown below:
According to the output, it looks like we have a JPEG image file. There is also some other interesting data displayed, but we will get back to that. There doesn’t, however, appear to be any information about the location.
