WiCYS CyberStart (Amsterdam) Challenge 2

NOTE: There is a Gitbooks version of the same challenge walkthrough written by me. You can go ahead and check it out!

Briefing L01 C02

Mixed-up Messages

We’ve been informed that a group of hackers are communicating cryptically on a social media site.

Their messages have been getting increasingly cryptic; so much so that all of the posts now look jumbled up and don’t seem to make any sense!

We’ve found one post that we believe contains an important secret, and we need you to find out what that secret is so we can be ready to stop a possible cyber attack!

Tip: The secret is the flag.

Let’s go to the challenge

We are met with a social media page named Chirp (mimicking Twitter!) with HACKERBOT’S chirp (tweet)

At first glance, it looks like the text is written backward

Flag Capture

Well, let’s copy-paste the contents of the chirp and use on an online utility to reverse the text

Upon reversing the text, we find human-readable text, indicating the motive of the hackers

So we have apparently got our flag — time4hackattack

Let’s submit it and proceed to the next challenge. Currently, we have 200 points on the scoreboard.

Onward Ahoy!