Day 01: Censored

Challenge

I got this little image, but it looks like the best part got censored on the way. Even the tiny preview icon looks clearer than this! Maybe they missed something that would let you restore the original content?

Solution

The description sounds like it has something to do with the thumbnail image. Indeed if we download the image we see a QR code in the thumbnail image in our file explorer. We can use exiftool to extract the thumbnail image embedded in the JPEG format:

1

exiftool -b -ThumbnailImage f182d5f0-1d10-4f0f-a0c1-7cba0981b6da.jpg > thumbnail.jpg

Then we read this with QR scanner to get our flag

Flag