#athena-trace-2026
13 writeups ·all writeups
Convoy — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
A wire photo stripped of its caption. The work isn't recognising the scene — it's proving the metadata is really gone, then recovering the caption from syndication.
Cycle Support — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
A patent drawing sold as wall art, cropped just above the one field you need. The answer is a database lookup keyed on the fields that survived.
Everyone Knows the Face — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
One reverse image search identifies the photograph. The points are in two details on the same page: a pseudonym, and a date that isn't the date of the event.
House Hunting — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
A screened gazebo, no landmarks, no signage, no readable text. The whole challenge is knowing that the object is the index — and that the listing is the authority on spelling.
I love cats — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
The obvious contact address is a decoy. The real one is on a platform the business posts to more often than it updates its own site — and then a trailing newline waits to eat your submission.
Lost at Sea — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
A four-stage chain: read vessel data off a screenshot, derive an AES key from it, pull a ZIP out of the tail of a PNG, and unlock it with the ship's own call sign.
Massacar — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
The research chain resolved quickly. Nearly two hundred attempts went into a different problem: guessing which object the setter had anchored the coordinate to.
Meeting — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
An OSINT wire-photo challenge that hinges less on the identification and more on two format traps: an underscore that isn't a separator, and an official spelling that most news sources get 'wrong'.
Night Shift — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
A bare 56-character string turns out to be an address. Behind it: ten million records across twenty shards, one lookup, one count, and a couple of things in the data that aren't records at all.
Nuclear — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
A misfiled photo of a Japanese motorcycle club, a UI footer that lies about the country, and a POI pin that has to be trilaterated because the plus code isn't precise enough.
One Photograph — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
A caption that names the landmark instead of the venue, a statue that vanished into an overexposed sky, and a flag that wanted the newspapers' spelling rather than the historically correct one.
Op Sindoor — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
A single interior photograph, nine candidate sites, and a naming convention that decides whether a correct identification still scores.
Tribute to "The Legend" — Athena Trace 2026 Writeup
A quote, a service record, and a record-breaking climb identify the man in minutes. The challenge is realising which of his summits the question is actually asking about.