Dead Drop

Owner:

Josh

Solution:

PUBLIC VIEW

Partial Answers

WRONG DIGIT: Keep going

CVEIWPBUIL: Keep going

GC Notes:

.

Presentation:

The team finds a brick with a USB flash drive sticking out of it. On it are ten MP3 files named 01.mp3 through 10.mp3. Each file's transcript follows the following pattern: "Dialing extension <six spoken digits> <six animal sounds>. You have reached the voicemail inbox of <name>." For example:

<<01.mp3>>

Walkthrough:

Teams should note that each track has a six digit extension and six animal sounds in addition to a person's name. They should be trying to map animal noises to a corresponding number (see table to the right for the canonical mapping).

As they go through the tracks, they may also notice that people's names have a middle initial that if read out spell out WRONG DIGIT. People's first names also start with that letter

This indicates that each as each extension is dialed (using animal sounds instead of DTMF), one of them is incorrect. Teams should be noting which digit is wrong. Once they have all of those, they hopefully notice that each number being dialed has six digits and each person's last name also has six digits. Using the position of the incorrect digit as an index into the last name yields CVEIWPBUIL.

In each number dialed, a unique digit was misdialed. Using this correct digit as a sort order rearranges the previous into the answer PUBLIC VIEW.

Hinting:

• Each extension has a single digit appear twice. These are unique to each track and help figure out the canonical animal sound to number mapping.

• You may need to point out that the last names are all six letters long to clue them towards indexing into them.

• Re-ordering by the unique misdialed digit may require hinting.

Data:

People in each track