Catching The Bus
OSINT · squ1rrel 2025 · Helen
Last updated
OSINT · squ1rrel 2025 · Helen
Last updated
By Zwique (Team BlitzHack) – First Blood
We are provided with a screenshot depicting a conversation between two individuals. The challenge likely involves analyzing this chat to extract meaningful information, uncover hidden clues, or derive a flag.
Image Inspection
The screenshot appears to contain a text-based conversation. Potential important information include:
NiKe Factory Store
Address of the bus station:
Wombwell
Lane/Bleachcroft Way,
Barnsley S70 3NR, UK
Bus lisence plate has initials of their college.
Their college is located down along Provo River.
The first thing we need to find is the exact bus station using the given address. So, I used Google Maps to track down and found out it.
Great!!! The only two things left are Registration number and FleetNumber.
In my opinion, the most difficult part of this challenge involved identifying the Registration Number and Fleet Number. These two elements proved to be the trickiest and required deeper analysis to find.
We know that their initials of college are included in the license plate and college itself is around Provo River. I simply Googled and received the result below.
License plate may contain either BYU or UVU.
The issue with this PDF was that it didn't include a complete list of all the bus directions.
I then began searching through various websites that listed the plate numbers of all buses operated by StageCoach.
This websites provides information about various operators and their fleets. Thus, I looked for buses operated by StageCoach.
squ1rrel{SF10BYU.StageCoach.24183}
As the flag asks us to find credentials about bus, I looked for lines that are passing by this station. Three lines seem to stop at this point and it's not right approach to guess one of them. Therefore, I used one hint that messenger is coming from NiKe Factory Store.
Such a closes factory store is Nike Factory Store Rotherham and surprisingly line 22x stops at there.
If you take look of this bus, you'll find it is being operated by StageCoach Group. More detailed information can be found below.
I searched for different images of line 22x and compared their plate numbers one by one.
I initially thought the plate has to starts with letter Y and looked over the internet that starts with Y ends up with either BYU or UVU. But found nothing. However I've found this PDF that seemed to list all buses of StageCoach.
UVU didn't come up, but I've found the one containing BYU initials. But, it didn't word out.
I tried one-by-one until finding the exact bus fleet number ending with BYU. Turned out that had the number we're looking for.
Thank you.
