Athena Trace is an OSINT CTF. These are my writeups for thirteen of its 2026 challenges. A recurring theme: the identification was often quick, and the points were lost on the flag format — a spelling, a separator, a trailing newline. Each writeup says where that happened.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The research chain resolved quickly. Nearly two hundred attempts went into a different problem: guessing which object the setter had anchored the coordinate to.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.