Kase Scenarios: Solving The “Dark Waters” Promotional Invitation

Using OSINT to solve a fun teaser related to the upcoming Kase Scenarios challenge.

The initial invitation to the event, courtesy of Kase Scenarios.

The Kase Scenarios Twitter account published the above invitation as the initial teaser to promote their upcoming Dark Waters scenario.

First thing’s first, I did some digging into “Glen Rock”, which turns out is a real city! While not relevant for the purposes of this particular information, it’s definitely worth keeping in mind…

What really stands out about this invitation is the sticker in the bottom right corner, as it looks out of place and vaguely like a barcode. The key to deciphering the data is to determine what format was used, which is trickier than it sounds. If you research different types of barcodes online, you’ll find that there is a lot more information that you bargained for, and most of it likely isn’t helpful!

One trick that I was able to use to decipher this particular scenario was playing around with the settings on Aspose. Initially a barcode may not even be detected, but once you change the detection quality to “Excellent”, the site attempts to decipher the barcode as being “Code128.” When doing so, it gives the text “-u.be”, which is a hint, but isn’t the answer!

We know that the encoded data is likely a YouTube link from the decoded snippet, and we also know that the barcode is not Code128. Manually experimenting with the settings eventually gets us the answer, with the barcode type set to “CodablockF.” The information encoded links to a private YouTube video.

Watching the video gives very old South vibes, which is likely what they were going for since the title is “The good old days.” Reading the video’s description yields an interesting quote:

“Stir not murky waters if you know not the depth or the creatures that dwell beneath the surface.”

Doing some Googling informs us that the quote belongs to the book “Beyond the Reflection’s Edge”, a book by Bryan Davis. This connection wasn’t at all relevant, other than the connection to water; it can be discarded as a red herring.

The important part of the description is this:

Send me an email for more information.

If we visit the YouTube user’s profile, their email address can be obtained: p@kasescenarios.com.

The profile picture of the genericly-named “@user-wr3wc7db6z”

I did some digging into the profile picture by reverse searching the image in case there was anything else of relevance, but turned up empty-handed. Messaging the email provided yields us a relatively instant auto-response:

The email received when I messaged the address from the YouTube video account.

The contents of which are rather curious. To confirm that the coupon code wasn’t part of the challenge, I entered it into the Kase Scenarios website and saw that it was worth 20% off for the scenario.:

The coupon code wasn’t a part of the challenge, it worked to deduct 20% from the Kase Scenario purchase on their Thinkific website. What a good promotion!

The Imgur link we got in the email leads to the following image:

[embed]The image received from “P.”

Out of curiosity, I searched Google for “Alec Wolfe” + The Baltimore Observer, but it didn’t yield any results of interest. As you’ll learn if you partake in the full scenario, Alec is the main detective on the case that you will be attempting to solve.

That’s all there is to it! I highly recommend purchasing the full scenario, Kase put a lot of work into it and I was pleasantly challenged as I worked to solve everything. Stay tuned for more awesome future works out of this team, they’re good at what they do and they genuinely care about the users who will be completing the scenarios.