In this post, I’d like to give a brief overview of the cron program in Linux, with which I’ve been experimenting lately. Cron is a daemon (i.e. a continuously running program) that springs into action based on temporal events, as opposed to other triggers. Every minute it checks the config…

As you might expect, the final picoCTF Forensics exercise is the most challenging. I encountered a few red herrings along the way and I’d like to detail these first before moving on to explain two publicly available Python scripts that enable you to capture the flag. The file from which…

I found this to be among the most difficult of the picoCTF challenges in the Forensics section. The first thing I puzzled over is how to fix the corrupted file provided to us: ext-super-magic.img. There were quite a few links provided in the hints, some of which turned out to…

This CTF exercise involves recovering deleted files from a disk image file: animals.dd. Try mounting this image file on your Linux machine. You can do this easily in the GUI by right-clicking the image file and opening it with “Disk Image Mounter”: You should then see the mount point…

I’d like to start with this challenge as it took me quite a lot of time to figure out. You can either do it manually or with a Python script. I tried at first doing it manually, but had no luck with the final question that needed to be answered…

A “Capture the Flag” (or CTF) approach can be applied to anything, from real world games to computer games to self-teaching. Having a specific, limited goal to work towards can really focus the mind and is less overwhelming than trying to achieve a more ambitious goal in one improbable leap…