Tags: recon
Rating:
#Eric Liang
**Category:** Recon
**Points:** 100
**Description:** Eric played ctfs with some friends a while ago
##Write-up
This 100 point challenge was to find a flag related to Eric Liang and CTFs in which he participated in the past with some friends. The first thing we set out to do was find out more information on Eric to determine where we should be looking. We started with some background information on him from Facebook and found this post on the CSAW page:
![Image of 1]
(./Images/CSAW.png)
Our thinking now was to search the CSAW archives for the past 2 years for teams on which he may have participated. And here came the first of many frustrations for this challenge: There were hundreds of teams to search through and no team member listing! We looked through the list one at a time then decided to narrow the list to just the NYU teams and look up members on CTFTime.org. We got discouraged after looking up several teams and seeing no member listing. We moved on to the 2014 archive – this proved to be the first of many wrong turns we took on this challenge.
![Image of 2]
(./Images/teams.png)
The team members aren’t listed, again, but we went through the list to look for anything that would stick out, or maybe the flag? No, but we did find a team - BrooklynT Overflow - that was listed as a NYU team, that was also on the 2013 listing.
![Image of 3]
(./Images/brooklyn.png)
We looked this team up on CTFTime.org to see if it had a member listing or something more productive. Although Eric is clearly listed as a member of this team we didn’t find the flag just yet. We examined the image they had associated to the team, but that turned up nothing.
![Image of 4]
(./Images/logo.png)
We tracked down most of the solutions they posted for the past 2 years on the CTFs they participated in and the write-ups they posted for the flag. This got us nowhere. We decided to look into the team’s website.Again, we spent a lot of time examining this site - [http://www.isis.poly.edu/brooklynt-overflow ](http://www.isis.poly.edu/brooklynt-overflow) - for hidden flags. The hours we spent looking at everything on this site were – to put it kindly – regrettable. Every link was followed up and the source code to each page was examined. At this point we started looking into alternatives : maybe CTF in this case was a reference to on line gaming. We found out Eric was on the Poly Gaming Network club, so we went onto Steam and looked up event records for the past 2 years associated to PGN and Eric. I won’t say how much time we wasted here, but it was getting ugly.
We decided to start over and re-examine the archive for 2013 and 2014. Under the Quals menu we located the Competitors listing.
![Image of 5]
(./Images/competitors.png)
We searched again for more NYU teams to track down. We started making a list of all the other NYU teams to follow up on when we came across the flag in plain sight! We had been here hours before, but didn’t make it this far down the list? Maybe we were in the wrong year? I don’t know for sure why we didn’t see this originally, I may never forgive myself for not seeing it on the first visit. Eric is real!!
![Image of 6]
(./Images/flag.png)
