In a distant galaxy, far far away, stood Klumgongyn (pronounced k-lum-gone-gin) staring at earth through a wormhole. When all of a sudden, “Hey Mom, I am hungry, so me and the gang are going to go to the human planet to check on things and grab a snack. I will be back before you can say Klumgongyn 3 times backwards in pig Latin.” Then Klumgongyn jumped into a souped up Quad⁹ Atomic Strider, hit the warp paddle, and vanished into the wormhole. Three pico-parse later Klumgongyn was picking dust and gravel from every orifice after crashing into the planet.
Star date 04012022 Ships log. It is 2300 and Dimzech just spammed every agent with a mission brief advising them that we had a visitor that needed our help. They had impacted earth at approximately 2200, but contact had been lost at entry due to the hyper sonic speed at which they entered the atmosphere. The only thing known is that he needs to be found in a hurry because his mamma is on her way and she’s pissed.
SPOILER ALERT!!! If you read past this point and you plan to solve the April 2022 CTF — Operation Galaxios — turn back now because the rest of this posting will reveal all the correct responses.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED — click here to be transported to a safe place (here)
Ok, first thing first, I don’t know if that is how you pronounce our alien friends name — just made it up. Second, I will not be spelling out Klumgongyn every time. The Hacktorian Masters successfully kept Klumgongyn’s gender neutral, but damn… I just can’t help but believe that only the male of any species would slam into a planet and do the silly stuff that Klumgongyn did through out this challenge. So from here on if you see he or him or K or Klum or Special K — just know that I am respectfully talking about KLUMGONGYN.
This challenge was the first time that the Hacktorians’ delivered it in steps. Every 3 days a new step was released and we would be tasked with solving it… Jeopardy style. Each step would need to be investigated based on the information provided in the text or image, but we wouldn’t know whether we had the answer until the questions were released. Step 7, which was the final clue was accompanied by the release of the questions that needed to be answered. We were given 3 attempts to correctly answer the questions. (not 3 per question but 3 tries to answer all)
When I solved Step 7 and looked at the questions, I couldn’t answer them all. It took me all 3 attempts to solve the CTF. I submitted my final attempt on April 27th @1600 and was so very pleased that I had been successful.
In this write-up I will be solving each step in progression — BUT I did not solve them this way in the challenge. I just feel that if you are going to read the step you should see the solution and the rationale in one place.
With all that out of the way let’s step into this journey and I will share my path to finding Special K and getting him back to his mommy.
The Mission
Order of Hades is up to it’s old tricks, but with a new bag this time. According to the boss, earth isn’t ready for what they are up to and if they succeed it will be bad. So we need to stop them!
Now you know as much as we did, and honestly, you need to read the brief for this one.
Step 1 — Hot coffee in the lap
Hot coffee in the lap is why I think Klum wrecked. His fancy strider has a beverage dispenser and it malfunctioned, pissing scalding hot Starbeans coffee in his lap; and also why the paper is stained. Below is our introduction to Klum’s language written on a stained piece of paper.
I started this step late because I was traveling to see my grandkids. I did however show them the clue and the two oldest said they wanted to learn to write in alien. We laughed about it and then went back to hanging out.
The next evening and back home I thought — there has to be an alien font. NOPE. This character set was created by our Hacktorian Masters. I will admit though that I never really stopped looking for a font, and because I never found one — I have started creating one. It is ugly and incomplete because I am still missing no less than 1 character and possibly 2. (still working on cleaning it up)
Moving on
After a few hours of staring at the writing I went back to Discord and Surprise!!! (not) Someone had already solved it. As more time passed a couple more solved it and the hint was unanimous that ‘pen and paper’ was the trick. But how?
- I printed the image
- I traced it on the back of the paper.
- I held both sides up to a mirror.
- Held it up to light.
- I turned the image in every direction
- Tried to read left to right, right to left, top to bottom…
Finally I shared it with a friend who said, “send the image to me and let me take a stab at it.” They had read my write-up for the previous operation and asked to join in the fun. “Maybe the character in the second word that looks like a backwards E is an E?”
OK then lets see if a Wordfinder tool can help. I passed the following wildcard search to the Wordfinder, “ ?E?? “, and after too many clicks I made a guess that the next letter was an L but that maybe the next was actually a B — so I tried “ ?ELB “. There are no 4 letter words (in English language) that end in ELB. That scared me because though I may know how to use Google Translator — I don't know any other language to translate characters to.
Let’s skip past all my normal ramblings and share that once I decided the word was HELP and not KELP or WELP… I used those characters to produce this:
H?????
HELP ?E
E???PE ????
PL??E?
The P looking character became an M — to reveal ME. I took a guess that the V was an A, the Y thing was a Y, and the O thing was an O. Producing this version:
H?MA??
HELP ME
E??APE YO??
PLA?E?
At this point I felt I knew what Klum was asking:
Honestly — I didn’t believe that it was right, but I went with it hoping that the entire character set would eventually be exposed. But for now… it was time to wait.
While I waited for Step 2, I created a character chart.
Solution
What is the translation of the first step?
HUMANS
HELP ME
ESCAPE YOUR
PLANET
Step 2 — The Process of Elimination
I will be honest and say that I stumbled for a bit here. Why? Well because Step 1 was a scanned message from Klum and Step 2 was written down by the Tiberian comms tech… Immediately the 2yr old in my head asked the much older me — “How did the tech get the same paper that Klum?” and “Are they both sloppy aliens?” and “If they are both aliens why am I the one translating, when obviously the comms tech knows how to copy alien.”
Shhhhhh… Go back to sleep kid.
Now we have to solve for more letters.
With the letters we have the field looks like this: (in case you haven’t figured it out — the ? is used to represent the missing letters)
? AM ?LUMP?ON?YN
?ROM ??Y?OTON
STUC? ?N A ?A?E ??TH
THE PA?NT?N?S
O? MY ANCESTORS
?N THE ?AST LAN?
?HERE ALL CREATURES
TR? TO ??LL ME
Even without an advanced degree in alien linguistics you likely also saw the answer to this one pretty quick:
I AM KLUMGONGYN
FROM ??Y?OTON
STUCK IN A CAVE WITH
THE PAINTINGS
OF MY ANCESTORS
IN A VAST LAND
WHERE ALL CREATURES
TRY TO KILL ME
Why didn’t I solve where Klum is from?
Well I will let you tell me where Klum is from in the comments. It is the evening of 04/30/2022 and early morning of 5/1/2022 when I am writing this, the challenge will have concluded before I complete this write-up and I still don’t know where Klum is from. My intent, as in step 1, was to let it ride expecting that there would be a full alphabet revealed throughout the CTF. But… in the end I never saw an entire alphabet emerge. So, I don’t know where Klum is from, and I am ok with that.
LIAR! It is driving me bat shit crazy, but when I asked for the complete character set after solving the entire CTF, I was denied. So we move on.
We now have the following characters:
All done — Right?
I really did think I was done; even reported it in the Discord channel. Seeing no one else chatting about it I kind of felt like I won a lottery or something. But just then one of my peers asked, “Did you find the location?” I responded that I couldn’t identify the planet, or what ever it is to be, to which they said, “No. Where is Klumgongyn?” Then moments later one of the Hacktorians’ chimed in and said that we needed to solve for the location.
DUH!!! re-read the text goofball: “translate the message and locate Klumgongyn”
I had done my normal thing and glazed over the text for the pretty picture and never stopped looking at the picture. Now back on course I set out to find Klum.
Where is Klum?
At the end of this exercise I had 3 locations and felt confident that any of them could be the location. I will admit that I did ask myself “Why in the hell is this clown shooting across the universe with paintings of his ancestors?”
But enough about that — lets break it down.
In a cave
with paintings of my ancestors
in the vast land
where all creatures try to kill me
So we needed to find a cave, in a vast land, with paintings of Klum’s ancestors, AND where everything was trying to kill him.
Where are vast lands that are populated with “creatures” that want to kill you? Well if you are Klum — we are a creature but lets ignore that for now. My first thoughts were, Australia, Africa, India, and South America. You can make your own arguments for places that you might select, but those were mine. Then I asked Google, “cave + alien paintings” and the internet broke.
11,100,000 results… BUT at the top of the list — Australia. So I clicked on the first link and there I was staring at a mention of each location in my hit list; the country or continent that is. I read the article and then another and another… In the end I had reduced my list by — 0 and added 20. There are caves with alien paintings all over the world. Heck, there are probably some on every rock in the sky for all I know. Yes — I did lose sight of my control for a bit. But that is not unusual for me.
Then Step 3 came out and I put a pin in it for a bit. I worked to solve Step 2 all the way to the very end. It took me all 3 attempts to identify the location. But I can say that these were my locations that I had settled on being the only ones it could be and were I to be wrong I would just have to be wrong and not complete the CTF.
Each of the locations I selected fit the description of vast and everything wants to kill you.
- Chhattisgarh, India — This was actually to be my 2nd choice in my list but as I read about the caves in Australia the hubbub regarding the one in India derailed me. There was such a big deal made about how the local India government had asked NASA to help authenticate, that I got distracted enough to make this location my first guess.
- Tassili n’Ajjer, Africa — This was to be my 3rd choice but after submitting India I saw someone on Discord say that “everything is in the same general area”. I have no clue what that really meant but given that someone had already been announced as the winner — chaos won me over, I made this my second guess. Boy was I glad that I had one more guess.
- Kimberly, Australia — This was to have been my my first submission and is in fact the correct response. If you search ‘alien paintings in caves’ on the wild wild web every search will always bring Kimberly to the top of the list.
But in the end, each location was a complete guess. Even now looking back at the translation and the clues given, there is nothing absolute in the clues. But that is not unlike real OSINT work; you will not always have clear and concise clues/evidence that provides an exact answer. Sometimes you have to use what you have to “GUESS” and in the end your guess (if incorrect) is eliminated and thus is the definition of “The process of elimination”.
Solution
What is the place Klumgongyn described in this step?
Kimberly, Australia
Step 3 — The Cave
Here we are introduced to Klum’s artsy fartsy side. Apparently the battery on his fancy alien smart watch has no end of life or it generates its own power, because mine would have been dead before the end of Step 1. We also learn that Klum must have needle sharp fingers because he drew this on his watch:
The challenge is to find the place where the Order of Hades has taken Klum. So what are we looking at?
a cave
a plant
a bush or tree
Note: It is very likely that the Hacktorian Masters just went for a roll on the floor laughing at me… but don’t worry I will let you laugh at me too, in a few moments.
Where can I find a weird looking plant like these? I passed a screen capture to Bing and Yandex setting the focus on the lower right drawing. It came back with bonsai looking trees and other similar plants, as well as some large trees on the plains of Africa. That planted the first seed that Step 2 might be the cave in Africa. After that I went to Google… (that’s right) “Hey Google, show me mushroom shape trees in Africa”
Though I found the African Baobab, there was no love for the limb structure of the image so I moved to the other locations. India showed me the Banyan, but in the end each produced the same results.
So I did what I should started with and I removed the location variable:
In case you cant see it — there’s the tree. Click on any of the like images and you quickly learn that the Dragon Blood tree grows in only 1 place — Socotra Island off the coast of Yemen.
There is also the “bottle tree”
and caves. But I couldn’t decide if it was Dogub, Hog, Halah, or Daub cave.
OK OK OK… I will let you in on the joke… It is not a frigging cave — it is instead a cross section of the Dragon Blood tree. But the drawing looks like a cave — but mostly because we were looking for a cave in Step 2, and it is not in color… that would have indeed made it easier to see my mistake.
Also, the plant is not a plant but rather an immature Dragon Blood tree; you have to admit though that the plant and the tree — they look similar in the branch area.
And now, if you are through laughing at me, lets move on. Oh wait. We can’t. We have to wait for Step 4, so it was back to Step 2.
Solution
What is the location depicted in the drawing?
Socotra island, YEMEN
Step 4 — The Wayback Machine Failed Me
Step 4 turned out to be quite challenging; not the translation but the finding what Klum wanted from us to find. Lets translate:
Using the characters we have so far we have a message that looks like:
I ESCAPED
I AM IN?URED
NEED SOMA TO HEAL
FIND RECIPE ON
HUMAN INTERNET
VERIFICATION CODE
KLUMO
We were given one more character, the J, and shown that there will be some uniqueness in characters. The C in Steps 1&2 is far more formal than in this Step. The H in line 3 for heal, doesn’t match the H in line 5 for human — YES I am looking that close because I am confident in the skills of our hosts to use subtle differences to create these challenges.
The message translated to:
I ESCAPED
I AM INJURED
NEED SOMA TO HEAL
FIND RECIPE ON
HUMAN INTERNET
VERIFICATION CODE
KLUMO
And this is our updated character set:
Lets break the request down to it’s parts:
I am injured, need soma to heal
Find recipe on human internet
Verification code klumo
I want to add here that it is because of this step that when I do finally make it back to Step 2 — I questioned everything. You see it was in this step that I determined that what is big/little, large/small, vast/sparse is subjective. What difference does that make? Well, because the brief for this step says that finding Klum on the island might be difficult “given the size of the place”. For me, this island is comparable of me driving from one side of my city to the other. You can fit no less than 180 of those islands in my home state. So my definition of vast or large or big is considerably over scaled to that of the brief.
Soma — The Drug of the Gods
Looking for Soma recipes I found the chemical make up of a drug, links to descriptions of mythological versions, and many guesses as to the actual ingredients that might have been used in old world soma. But with no more direction than “need soma” and “find recipe on human internet” — I just grabbed a few possible sources and went about waiting for the next step.
A bit later the brief was revised to include a new piece of information that read, “If my memory serves me well, Klumgongyn started a blog last time when visiting earth, maybe that has something to do with this.”. This meant that we had to search the internet for a very specific recipe.
From that point on I researched Soma to the point that I found an Indian practitioner of Ayurveda, who was very entertained by the challenge and could tell me how to make a version of Soma but as for that code they could only tell me that there is nothing in the practice of natural remedies that would translate to a verification code. Yes, I really found someone and that is just how far off in the weeds I was. Again guessing was the name of the game.
Retracing My Steps
In the wee hours of day 24, I revisited a site I had previously checked using the Wayback Machine… Why the WBM? Well because I just knew that it was a possibility that our hosts had found or created a blog post, requested an archive, and then delete the post to increase the difficulty. But not finding one I kept searching the internet. Then the recommendation came out to use OSINT Framework and keep it simple. Well that didn’t help me. (So I will be interested to see how that was actually used to find the blog. I found myself drowning in the possibilities even by trying to keep it simple.) But my resolution was ultimately to go back to Hacktoria, click the ‘site map’ link, hit F3 to search and typed ‘soma’… POOF. Like magic there it was, and at the end of the blog was the verification code.
Solution
Link the URL to the correct blogpost?
https://klumgongyn.wordpress.com/2022/04/10/how-to-easily-prepare-and-consume-soma/
Step 5 — Particles In The Sky
Here we were informed that the island was too big to search, but that Klum was able to get another message through, and to top it off his mom was getting closer by the minute.
We only got one new character in this one, the B; which gives all the letters we will be given for the entirety of the CTF.
Translation:
THEY TOOK ME ON A
BOAT THEN A CAR TO
AN AIRPLANE BUILDING
HAD FLAGS IN BLUE
WHITE AND GREEN AND
RED STAR TAKING ME
TO PLACE WHERE I
MAKE PARTICLES GO
FASTER IN THE SKY
WILL PRETEND TO
POOP AND TELEPORT
OUT OF HERE IN THE
TOILET STALL
WAIT ONE STINKING MINUTE… You mean that Klum has super powers??? He can teleport… Why the heck hasn’t he popped out of their possession before now? Wait. Is that what Order of Hades is after?
In this step we need to find an “airplane building” and “the place where I make particles go faster in the sky”.
I will admit that part of the challenge of this step was figuring out how to read the message. Was it make particles go faster in the sky or something else. I landed on this being what he was saying:
THEY TOOK ME ON A BOAT
THEN A CAR TO AN AIRPLANE BUILDING
HAD FLAGS IN BLUE AND WHITE AND GREEN AND RED STAR
TAKING ME TO PLACE WHERE I MAKE PARTICLES GO FASTER
IN THE SKY WILL PRETEND TO POOP
AND TELEPORT OUT OF HERE IN THE TOILET STALL
The flag wasn't difficult and is on the shorelines surrounding the island. Google search for “flag blue white green red star”
With the flag of Djibouti known, I just modified the search to “Djibouti airport“ and saw it was a stones throw from the shoreline; they probably could have walked from the dock.
But where is this “make particles go faster” location? This is another one where we had to make a guess. I made an assumption that we were looking for a particle accelerator. So I did a web search for particle accelerators around the world. (lesson learned from the tree) The results were splattered all over but this list became my guide.
URL: http://www-elsa.physik.uni-bonn.de/accelerator_list.html
I first looked in Africa and identified the iThemba Lab in Cape Town, South Africa — this became my first item in the list. Then I came back to my senses after realizing that the list of more than 100 (incomplete as it is) was not the best use of my time because… I don’t have 1 guess per location.
So admitting to myself that the Order of Hades could be taking Klum anywhere in the world, I decided to see where you can fly directly to from Djibouti.
This reduced my focus to:
- Paris
- Istanbul
- Dubai
- Doha
- Jeddah
- Aden
- Hargeisa
- Dire Dawa
- Addis Ababa
- Mogadishu
So what did I do? I looked for particle accelerators in these locations, and the only one that had one was Paris. But that wasn’ in the list, I just happened to do a web search and learned that Louvre has one for cleaning art. Here I will fast forward and tell you that my search led me to select Potsdam, Germany as my first guess. I chose this one because… well it was a guess.
Keep in mind that there is nothing in the translation that would contradict, even if I had selected the Louvre in Paris or even Cape Town. So with Potsdam written down I moved on the Step 6. Because by this time I was behind and Step 7 was on the verge of being released.
In the end, the Potsdam guess was incorrect and I needed to revisit the step. As I did this I also trolled Discord and the general consensus was that we were all over thinking this one. I messaged a peer and shared that my next guess was going to be the Louvre in Paris, but I asked for a better explanation of that statement to which they said, “think famous”. And honestly that was enough to jar my memory loose and a phrase from my generation came to the tip of my tongue — “super collider”. Thirty seconds later I saw that Geneva Switzerland was only a 5 hour drive, a 4 hour train ride, or another 1 hour flight. But that was not how I made my decision.
Step 6 was released and I knew where Klum needed to go and where he ended up. What that means is that I had more variable that effected my decision making process. Submitting CERN in Geneva Switzerland, was based on the fact that it is in the flight path to Paris from Djibouti; that is how I picked LHC. There was no deductive reasoning except that I was given a hint to think famous and that my famous location was in Geneva Switzerland.
SOLUTION
From what city to what city were they taking Klumgongyn?
FROM: Djibouti, AFRICA
TO: “The Large Hadron Collider” at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland
Step 6 — Resurrected Fox
For this one there was no translation needed, apparently Klum’s mommy was close enough to do the translation for us, but not close enough to locate him. We also learn that Klum’s teleportation from the plane had unfortunately landed him in the wrong location. (and time if you want to be honest)
Along with a very detailed description of where he was supposed to have land; for which we needed lat/lon for. Tthere was also a picture of where Klum had landed. Locating the obelisk in Cairo wasn't complicated however this picture was another story.
I am going to fast forward through this one because the lesson I learned meant more to me than the journey.
Keep in mind that I am old and I remember as a young adult these mascots being in the news. So I almost immediately knew that this was Labib and the location was Tunisia, Africa. But, by the time I arrived at this step it was clear that Tunisia would not be an exact enough location. Add to that, these statues were torn down just over a decade ago and you might see why this one was difficult. The history lesson was fun, but not being able to find the location based on this picture of Labib was mind melting. I did spend a lot of time doing what I typically do to images but it was fruitless.
I used all the surface level tools I normally use, and even one that I was recently made aware of when doing a geolocation challenge (Overpass Turbo). I did eventually find the image in Tineye, but that image was published on a French site that has long since deleted the post and was not available in the Wayback Machine. So I was back to scratching my head until someone posted a tool on Twitter that I had never seen before, so I gave it a go.
I passed the image into Zorexeye reverse image search and seconds later the location was revealed to me. This tool is one of those that searched everywhere for you at once. So it was able to pass the image to places I had never even considered that would exist. Partly because — I would need to be in another country location to have my browser present it in an initial search result, and it circumvented all my language barriers to give me this link.
URL: https://mapio.net/a/114473000/
I had spent many days looking for this extinct fox, and now here it was resurrected for us as part of Klum’s Excellent Adventure.
SOLUTION
What location did Klumgongyn end up in? And what is the location of the Obelisk?
GAMMARTH, TUNISIA (36.9099336,10.2866965)
CAIRO, EGYPT (30.1292782,31.3054997)
Step 7 — Dit Dit Dit Dah Dah Dah Dit Dit Dit
This may be one of the only times you will see me say this — but this one was easy. (for me)
But only because I spent 15 years of my life volunteering as a sound and light technician. So when I saw the file it was immediately passed into Sonic Visualiser where I was able to see the 3rd track. I had technical difficulty with the tool so switched over to Audacity, muted tracks 1 and 2, and I heard another hobby of mine — HAM Radio/Morse Code.
I will tell you that I cannot copy code like a pro and ultimately cheated on this one. How did I cheat? I zoomed in on the wave profile and saw the distinctive length of each sound and was able to see each dit and dah clearly:
SOLUTION
What is the code needed to activate the rescue beacon?
-… . .- — / — . / ..- . — . / … -.-. — — — — -. — (-> BEAM ME UP SCOTTY <-)
Final Submission
Step 01 — What is the translation of the first step?
HUMANS
HELP ME
ESCAPE YOUR
PLANET
Step 02 — What is the place Klumgongyn described in this step?
Kimberly, AU
Step 03 — What is the location depicted in the drawing?
Socotra island, YEMEN
Step 04 — Link the URL to the correct blogpost
https://klumgongyn.wordpress.com/2022/04/10/how-to-easily-prepare-and-consume-soma/
Step 05 — From what city to what city were they taking Klumgongyn?
FROM: Djibouti, AFRICA
TO: “The Large Hadron Collider” at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland
Step 06 — What location did Klumgongyn end up in? And what is the location of the Obelisk?
GAMMARTH, TUNISIA (36.90993364582283, 10.286696463638986)
CAIRO, EGYPT (30.1292782,31.3054997)
Step 07 — What is the code needed to activate the rescue beacon?
-… . .- — / — . / ..- . — . / … -.-. — — — — -. — (-> BEAM ME UP SCOTTY <-)
Lessons
Lesson 1 was that write-ups can be authored by more than just the winners. During this adventure I had pondered whether or not I would produce a write-up if I was unsuccessful in completing the CTF. After some time talking to self and fielding requests for guidance on those that I had not identified as questions I wasn’t able to answer. I came to the conclusion that we all succeed differently and do things as equally different. So regardless of completing a CTF, I will always produce a write-up; time allowing and life not pulling me away from it. Why? Because no matter the opinion of my presentation I do things different than you. And if me writing down my journey will help someone else learn a new way or help them see that we all chase multicolored rabbits and that ‘winning’ is not that you got the prize but that you learned. Then the time I spend rambling off the stuff in my head will continue for as long as I am able.
Lesson 2 is simply that as much as I respectfully call those who finish challenges in minutes super stars or rock stars — I am no less their peer. During my floundering in this challenge I helped some who I call our super stars refocus by just talking through what they knew and they went on to finish; long before me. So at the end of the day — I am no less a rock star than any of us are. We all contribute and we should never lost sight of that, whether in CTF or life.
Closing
In closing, my hope is that even if you didn’t heed my warning and read this before attempting the challenge — DO IT ANYWAY! It is good practice. And isn’t that what this is all about?
