Phenominal-Photo

Challenge

Simon was spotted dwelling under the clock-tower yet again, this time taking pictures. He seems to have captured a strange object in the far far distance going left, right, up, and down seemingly lost or out of control. There is a strange aura radiating from the photo, pulsations even, like an SOS. Can you figure out this strange phenomenon??

An extra hint:

Things sometimes get lost in translation

And the picture:

Solution

I first tried the usual file, strings and binwalk but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. After uploading it on Aperi'Solve I saw that there was something hidden inside. Using Steghide I managed to extract it.

And after opening the archive you can find 2 files inside:

The archive is locked with a password, so let's focus on Map.txt instead. It contains some weird glyphs and after some searching I found its Alien Language. I deciphered it using dCode:

Following the directions, I entered the first letter of each direction as a password and it opened the archive. This contained one file with more Alien Language. We use our decoder again and we've got the flag !