Stego 5

[BhaaL]

I think the words byte boundaries and alignment might work. Think of what it is, or better, what it is not.

[FutureHypoon]

Hey guys, I'm trying, but this one's getting me. In order to determine if a byte is of interest, I expected to be looking for trios, but that doesn't work. Unless, are missing bytes part of the mission? or are they a part of the BMP file format?

By looking for flawed trios, I only found 27 'bytes of interest', which isn't enough to correspond to 27 bits. 32 bits or 24 bits would make a lot more sense to me.

I tried gray-scaling the image for comparison, and it only helped the above confusion.

Hopefully I didn't just post any real spoilers, If I did, mods please fix it up so it's not too revealing.

Is there a separate "original" image so-to-speak that I couldn't find? all the other hack-the-planet icons were jpegs... converting using GIMP provided a very different result (byte for byte, they were visually identical).

[chupacabras12]

mmm ... unless I really missed all the relevant data, and I believe that the password given in the file is incomplete in order to make this challenge harder. But from the part of the password given, one can guess the missing part.

[BhaaL]

I suggest you remove the spoiler again, and keep going in that direction. Most people think it has to do with that, because they only could find that part of it.

[Slim420]

Ok, I'm a little lost here, I got the pw (i think), but it either has too many chars or not enough, my guess is not enough.

With the data provided, I have 9 characters (but i think i should have either 11 or 8), by the hints provided in this forum about t**/** the first 7 letters are right (and possibly the 8th, since it follows the pattern), then I'm not exactly sure because the code stops making sense after that. I guess I can google for ***-*** and try some guessing on the mission page, but as for finding the complete password in the image data, I dont think its all there.

*EDIT*
I figured it out with some guessing.

[Martyy]

Are you really supposed to figure it out by guessing?
I found the first 2/3 of the password and guessed the rest.
One thing still confuses me, i looked at the file with GIMP and found something that didn't seem to be relevant... any light on that? Maybe the last bits of the password?

[Defience]

You do not need to guess at it, just look elsewhere.

[Martyy]

okay.. i will most likely go back to it later on... let the mind rest for now

[omicrom]

Alrighty, So i have just spent a couple of good hours hand scanning the bmp for least significant bit message but i found nothing so i really want to know if i am approaching it in the right way by looking for the LSB message and i also wonder if the message has been broken down into piece and spread out in some sort of algorithm. If anyone is willing to let me know if i am on the right track or not i will be most grateful.

Thanks for you help
omi

[Defience]

Take a look at the HTS avatars that are offered, you might find something familiar.