Find the Masked Man — 3: How I Tracked a Hooded Figure Across Paris Using Only a Blurry Storefront…

Find the Masked Man — 3: How I Tracked a Hooded Figure Across Paris Using Only a Blurry Storefront… | by mayhack - Freedium Milestone: 20GB Reached We’ve reached 20GB of stored data — thank you for helping us grow! Patreon Ko-fi Liberapay Close < Go to the original Find the Masked Man — 3: How I Tracked a Hooded Figure Across Paris Using Only a Blurry Storefront… Challenge Overview : mayhack Follow ~5 min read · April 1, 2026 (Updated: April 1, 2026) · Free: Yes Find the Masked Man — 3: How I Tracked a Hooded Figure Across Paris Using Only a Blurry Storefront Sign The Brief Someone had been photographed on the streets of Paris — December 3rd, 2023, around 6 PM. Their face was deliberately obscured. The challenge wasn't to unmask them. It was to find exactly where they had been standing, and identify the nearest Paris metro station. The clues given: the photo was taken near the intersection of a rue and an avenue , somewhere in a central, upscale Parisian district. That's it. No GPS. No address. No metadata. Just a night photograph of a hooded figure — and whatever the background happened to reveal. Step 1 — Read Everything, Miss Nothing Before touching any tool, I opened a notepad and wrote down every single piece of information the description gave me. This habit sounds trivial but it's saved me more than once — context clues buried in challenge text are easy to overlook when you're rushing to Google. Here's what I noted: Date: December 3, 2023 Time: ~18:00 (early evening, dark) City: Paris Area: Central + upscale district Intersection: Rue × Avenue Mission: Find the nearest metro station Step 2 — Metadata Check (A Dead End, But a Necessary One) First thing I always do with a challenge image — check the metadata. EXIF data can contain GPS coordinates, device info, timestamps. I ran it through the terminal: $ exiftool mask.jpeg Nothing. The image had been stripped clean — no GPS, no camera model, nothing useful. This is common in CTFs. The challenge designer is telling you: you'll have to work harder than that . Fair enough. Back to the photo itself. Step 3 — Google Lens told me the building style I looked at the background of the image. Behind the masked guy there's a building — tall windows, light coloured stone, very uniform floors. Classic Paris look. I dropped the image into Google Lens and it came back with "Haussmann-style architecture" — which is that famous 19th century Parisian building style you see all over central Paris. That matched perfectly with the "upscale central area" hint from the description. Good, we're in the right part of the city. But I still needed something more specific — a street, a landmark, anything. Step 4 — Pulling the Thread: Who Is "Julien"? My first search was a dead end. Searching just "Julien Paris" gives you restaurants, people, street names — too broad to be useful. But I looked at the image again. The sign was on what appeared to be a shopfront — a ground-floor establishment with warm interior lighting, visible through glass. That detail mattered. This wasn't a street name or a person. It was a business. I refined the search: "Julien shop Paris" . And then I found it — Maison Julien , a well-known Parisian establishment. The name fit. The style fit. The upscale neighbourhood fit. One more clue confirmed: the blue glow visible in the background of the photo matched the kind of illuminated display signage you'd see outside a boutique or patisserie — consistent with what Maison Julien looks like at night. Step 5 — Pinning the Location, Finding the Station I opened Google Maps and searched for Maison Julien, Paris. The pin dropped — and the surrounding area matched everything: upscale district, the distinctive street geometry of a rue-avenue intersection, Haussmannian buildings all around. Now the final step: metro stations. I zoomed out slightly and looked at what was within walking distance. There, roughly 90 metres from the location, was a station: NEAREST METRO STATION Saint-Philippe-du-Roule Line 9 · 8th arrondissement · ~90m away Saint-Philippe-du-Roule sits at the intersection of Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and Avenue Myron Herrick — a rue and an avenue , exactly as the challenge description stated. The pieces locked perfectly into place. The Flag OSINT{SAINT_PHILIPPE_DU_ROULE} What This Challenge Taught Me The metadata was a dead end, but checking it first is still the right call — it takes thirty seconds and sometimes it gives you everything. The real breakthrough was learning to treat blurry background details as signal, not noise. A barely-readable word on a shopfront isn't trash — it's a breadcrumb. OSINT is often about finding the one pixel of information the subject didn't think to hide. And once you have that breadcrumb, you don't need much more. A shop name. A map. A 90-metre walk to a metro station. Case closed. 📬 Stay Connected If you found this helpful and want to learn more about web security, hands-on labs , feel free to follow me for upcoming posts. ✍️ Follow me for more cybersecurity write-ups 🔗 LinkedIn — codermayank 📸 Instagram — @mayhack_ Tags: #BugBounty #EthicalHacking #CyberSecurity #AIforSecurity #PenetrationTesting #HackerOne #Bugcrowd #WebSecurity #InfoSec #osint #osintindustries #themaskedman #cybersecurity #bug-bounty #osint #osint-investigation #hacking Reporting a Problem Sometimes we have problems displaying some Medium posts. If you have a problem that some images aren't loading - try using VPN. Probably you have problem with access to Medium CDN (or fucking Cloudflare's bot detection algorithms are blocking you).