In the old Hacktoria challenge, we try to find the location of a Colombian cartel.
Link: https://hacktoria.com/contracts/the-cartel-connection/
Briefing hints:
- National Police of Colombia
- yesterday afternoon at 14:37 Colombia Standard Time
- coastal regions
Analyze
There is a ship on the left but can’t identify it’s name.
On the bottom, we can see something similar to rails.
We see the other side of the water. There is a big chance that this is a river and not the sea.
I was not sure if the crane behind the truc was part of a boat or on the coast.
If we want to cheat a bit, we could say that Colombia is poorly street viewed, so it reduces a lot our research area
If the photo was taken at 14:37 on the date when the challenge was released (April 4th), then the sun should be west.
Meaning the photo points to the west and was taken from the right side of the river.
I searched places where the marine traffic was high: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-74.4/centery:6.9/zoom:6
Traffic is mostly located on the north:
I first checked for Buenaventura but nothing did correspond.
Then, the location near Cartagena, couldn’t correspond either because there is no vegetation like the photo (no palm trees, no sand around the river, etc…)
The last likely location is near Barranquilla, which the 4th most populated city in Colombia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_towns_in_Colombia).
There is a river that can be interesting:
The Street View coverage is pretty bad on the right side of the river:
So I tried to start from the left side, at the to of the city:
The distance between us and the other side matches, same for the vegetation. But the biggest hint are the rails:
So we are on the right path!
I continued to move around to find rails that are on the sand and finally found my way to the original photo:
To find the information needed for the flag, I simply clicked on the point available on the same street:
Answer: calle-106-riomar-barranquilla-atlantico-colombia
My guess with the sun and the side of the river was wrong because I focused on information given by the contract while the photo was taken from Google Street View (August 2019).
If we want to know the time where the photo was taken:
We don’t know the day. So I randomly chosen a date in August.
Given the position of the sun, the photo was approximately taken at 10:00 UTC-5