The Challenge

  • Name: Tricky Tree
  • Description: We've located the mastermind behind the infamous project ENARC. His name is Velasquez E Turrul. The only step remaining is to access his laptop, but the password is his father's birthday! Can you help stop project ENARC? Find the birthday of Velasquez E Turrul's father. Enter the flag in MM_DD_YYYY format Example: texsaw{03_23_2024}
  • Category: OSINT
  • Points: 150

The Solution

  1. Visit https://www.familytreenow.com/trees/715273
  2. Go to Enrique
  3. Click view profile 2 Sep 1985
  4. Format the flag texsaw{09_02_1985}

The Steps

The History

  • ENARC (Crane backwards) is the false god proposed to overtake our savour Temoc. For a particular unknown reason, our university has a tendency to like things spelt in reverse. And after the placement of a crane on campus, students strayed from the teachings of Temoc in favor of Enarc... No, I didn't make most of that up.

The Rabbit Holes

  • My first stop was to visit Google attempting the following queries
    • Velasquez E Turrul
    • "Velasquez E Turrul"
    • tree "Turrul"
    • "Turrul" Enarc
    • Visions of Enarc
    • Enarc 1980s
    • The Crane Bag
  • All of which led to these interesting reads:
    • The Trade directory of Central America and the West Indies
    • Port of Los Angeles: Annual Report - A report about import and exports coming and going from the port of Los Angeles from 1913
    • Visions of Enarc - A pair of paintings by the artist Barbara Crane
    • A great comic by The Mercury
    • The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies (1977-1981) - A journal of Irish culture, history, and politics.
  • Nevertheless, they were all red herrings, no doubt the intention of Enarc themself.

The Family Tree

  • After scanning, reading, and spending an uncomfortable amout of time I decided to branch my searches to other search engines, away from Google. I started with DuckDuckGo (which I should note for comedic purposes is my default search engine), and it was the first result... The DuckDuckGo search result
  • After discovering the family tree site, I went to his father Enrique, hit view profile, and found the birthday 2 Sep 1985
  • Formatting that into the flag we get texsaw{09_02_1985}