Challenge Description#

John had been chasing the same lead for days, the artist. His last post was eerie and something new. The artist shares one last image of a statue, strange, bearing a resemblence to his style of art. Help john figure out where this was taken.

Analysis#

The challenge continues the same trail from Utopia 1, so I stayed on the same Instagram identity and checked the another trip story highlight. The statue image mentioned in the description was there, and I pulled it first so I could do proper location triage.

My first thought was metadata, but the downloaded media had no useful EXIF fields for location, so that route died immediately.

After that, I converted the story image to JPG and ran reverse-image lookup in Google Images. That gave a strong location lead pointing to Varkala, India.

From the reverse-image results, I opened Visual Matches and found a matching reference that narrowed the place down to Oceano by Trouvaille in Varkala.

I searched that place in Google Maps and confirmed it matched the environment and statue context.

From the place listing, I checked owner photos/videos, found the exact same statue shot, and extracted the precise coordinates: 8.7267103,76.71179. The challenge requires 3 decimals for both values, so rounding/truncating to the required precision gives 8.726,76.711, which produces the final flag apoorvctf{8.726,76.711}.

Solution#

Follow the Instagram story-highlight lead, use reverse-image search to identify the place as Oceano by Trouvaille, Varkala, then read the exact coordinates from matching owner media in Google Maps.

Coordinates found: 8.7267103,76.71179

Required format (3 decimals): apoorvctf{latitude_longitude}

apoorvctf{8.726,76.711}