Oh look, it's a perfectly innocent picture of an apple. Nothing to see here!
Apples are suspicious. Don't trust apples. They always have something to hide . . .
We can use the strings
command to see the image data.
In the terminal, we type
$ strings apple.jpg
Unfortunately, this just prints a lot of gibberish.
What if we look for instances of easyctf{} instead?
$ strings -t x apple.jpg | grep 'easyctf{.*}'
This returns the line
4b924b the flag is easyctf{w0w_much_appl3s}
Alternatively, you could have just opened up the file in a text or hex editor, and used ctrl-f. But wheres the fun in that?
easyctf{w0w_much_appl3s}