Inner Demons

Challenge

I can't seem to sleep at night... Maybe I need to dig further within.

With a picture attached:

Solution

First I did the usual checks and everything looked normal. It's a JPG file with seemingly nothing hidden in it (we know that's not true though).

I used steghide to try to extract something but it didn't work without a passphrase and I tried multiple words, none worked.

So I decided to give stegseek a try (it's a brute-force cracking tool).

I'll admit, I was shocked at how fast this worked but we got the flag !

By the way, the passphrase was "jinju" which is the first name of the illustrator of the image we were given (from a manga named Uzumaki).

And the output contained the flag: