PatriotCTF 2025

I participated with my club team tjcsc in PatriotCTF 2025, and we got 54th overall!

Challenge: Where’s Legally Distinct Waldo One

Category: OSINT

Flag: pctf{horizon_hall}

So, here is the provided image:

My first thought was that it looked like a college campus. Knowing that this CTF was hosted by George Mason University, that’s where I looked first.

Looking at the university campus in Google Maps, I noticed that the building color scheme and design looked very similar to the building in the provided image.

So, I started looking around. There were two distinct features I was looking for:

First, I noticed a large cell tower. Then, I used the entrance to the building to narrow the specific angle the picture was taken from down. Upon looking around, I see:

That’s the cell tower we need! And the rest of the roof seems to match the image. Now, we need to find the specific building the picture was taken from. Using the entrance, we can narrow the possibilities down:

There seems to be only two entrances to the building that look similar to the one in the image. Looking at the one on the left, I see:

This seems to match quite well! I notice a few distinct similarities:

Let’s see what building matches this POV:

Horizon Hall? Let’s try that…

Boom! pctf{horizon_hall} was the flag. Pretty simple!