CyberTalnets Quals National CTF 2020

Mohamed Elmasry
5 min readSep 20, 2020

Hi People :D

This is My Write up For Cyber Talents Quals Round 2020, so let's get started

At first, Thanks to Omakmoh for helping me solve these challenges

General Information Category

Dangerous Office (Basic— 25 Points)

As you can see, you can search in google with the keyword “Viruses infect applications such as Microsoft Word or Excel” from the first article you will see the answer... it’s “macro virus

Answer: macro

Web Security Category

1- Pr0mo (Easy — 50 Points)

Challenge URL:
http://ec2-18-156-199-115.eu-central-1.compute.amazonaws.com/promo/

empty website :D

I tried to brute-force directories, But I didn't find anything. then I tried to intercept a request with Burp-Suite and I found a JWT token in cookie header

JWT Token

So, let’s decode this token with jwt.io

it’s HS256 Algorithm, I used JWT-Cracker to get the secret key

We found the secret key (123123)

go back to jwt.io again and add the secret key and change user to admin

intercept the request again and send it to repeater, Change the Token and you’ll see the Brain-Fu*k encoded string

go to This website to decode the string

We Found the Flag :D

Flag: FLAG{JWT_I_Lik3_iT}

2- Red Alert 2.0 (Easy — 50 Points)

Challenge URL: http://ec2-18-156-199-115.eu-central-1.compute.amazonaws.com/redalert/

I found this input and as the name of the challenge I tried to fire an XSS Alert Payload ( You can find good payloads Here ).

This payload worked for me : (“<noscript onkeyup=”alert(1337)” contenteditable>1337</noscript>”)

Fire this payload and simply you got the flag :D

Flag!

Flag: FLAG{Go0Gl3_XSs_XD}

3- Mystery (Medium — 100 Point)

Challenge URL: http://ec2-18-156-199-115.eu-central-1.compute.amazonaws.com/mystery/

After opening the source code, I found this MD5 hash strings

Decode it, you got these values ( 66, 1, 5 ).

so, trying to brute-force numbers after encoding it with MD5 ( You can make a simple script to handle this process )

After trying some numbers, I found the correct one.

It was 43 with a hash value “17e62166fc8586dfa4d1bc0e1742c08b

Open the file, you’ll see a plaintext flag

Flag: flag{MD5-N0T-1337}

Digital Forensics Category

1- Images3c (Easy — 50 Points)

Challenge File URL: https://hubchallenges.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/Forensics/cyber.zip

After unzipping the file, you’ll see this image

Images3c_image

I tried to use steghide to extract any hidden files, but the file protected with a password. so, let’s try to crack the password.

I used the Steghide-crack tool

Let’s run the script with rockyou wordlist and let the script guess the password

how to use steghide-crack

after a minute the tool success find the password

The password is “1234"

open output.txt

BINGO!!

We found the flag :)

Flag: flag{cyb3rs3cisaw3s0me}

2- Malicious File (Medium — 100 Points)

Challenge File URL: https://hubchallenges.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/Forensics/UsrClass.dat

After opening the file in Autopsy, go to Shell Bags the target file is there

We found the target file

Then, search for this file ( Windows Loader v2.2.2 ) with Keyword Search in the top right corner

We found an MFT entry for the target file

As the above image, The MFT entry is 17120 … The challenge want MD5 for this entry, so I use This website to generate a hash

We made it :D

Flag: d72eecc6b164864790fe25f2bd64a8ab

Cryptography Category

Queen (Medium— 100 Point)

Challenge File URL: https://hubchallenges.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/Crypto/queen.zip

unzip the file, you get a 4 text file that seems to be an image

I used a XORtool to brute-force the key and get image from each file

After this, you can find the image in xortool_out directory

hmmm, it seems to be a Mary Stuart Code encrypted

repeat this process to 4 files and enter the code from file1 to file4 in This Website to decode it

We got the flag :D

Flag: DONTTRUSTANYQUEEN

finally, Thank you for reading this writeup :D

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Mohamed Elmasry

Digital Forensics Investigator | CTF player and creator | SOC Analysts | Threat Hunter