Neuland Blog

On the 9th of December Neuland held its third Neuland CTF at Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt. Capture The Flag is a competition where you can legally hack and exploit intentionally vulnerable programs or websites. The participants solved tasks in the categories web, steganography, blue team, cryptography, osint (open source intelligence), reverse engineering, pwn/binary exploitation and miscellaneous tasks. For every hack the participants received a flag that secured them points and a place on the scoreboard....

Download challenges: Neuland CTF Repository Accounting - Easy An employee from the finance department downloaded an accounting template from the Internet; now he is writing an e-mail to the helpdesk that his computer is behaving strangely. Abrechnung_2023.xlsm We receive an Excel file with a seemingly ordinary payroll table that prompts us to activate macros. After activating macros, multiple notepads open with the text “Hacked!!!”. The hacker used the VBA macros to take over our computer....

Download challenges: Neuland CTF Repository Secrets - Easy Part 1: aynaq{o4f3 Part 2: ..--.- -.... ....- ..--.- .---- ..... ..--.- -. --- --... ..--.- ....- ..--.- Part 3: M05DcllwNzFvbn0= We get three parts of the flag encrypted/encoded by different methods. The first part of the message appears to represent nland{. The fact that { remains the same and the two Ns have been converted to As indicates a shift cipher....

Download challenges: Neuland CTF Repository Sanity Check - Easy Can be found on the introductory PowerPoint. The flag is nland{neuland-ctf-2023}. Lockpicking - Medium Open a lock with an instrument other than the proper key. Pick up a lock, pick, and tension wrench at the front and bring back the opened lock to the CTF orga to get the flag. The objective is simple; the lock must be opened using the included pick and tension wrench....

Download challenges: Neuland CTF Repository Geoguessr - Easy Can you find out which mountains I vacationed in last year? Flag format: nland{name of mountainous area} in all lowercase We get an image of a mountain range with no apparent clues. A good starting point for this type of task is Google Images. Images refers us to Besseggen, a piece of the Jotunheimen mountain range in Norway. The flag is nland{besseggen} or nland{jotunheimen}....

Download challenges: Neuland CTF Repository Higher and Lower - Easy No one has guessed my number yet, maybe you can find another way to get the flag. higher_lower.c The program is the well-known children’s game higher or lower. However, as the author teases in the description, there is probably no way to win the game fairly. In the enclosed C code, the flag is initially defined and then referenced in the main....

Download challenges: Neuland CTF Repository Login - Easy Log into my account to get the flag. login.exe We get a portable executable with the MD5 hash A97F6CA98E275F846150A4E1EC45FBD0. A closer look in a PE editor and process viewer like CFF Explorer tells us the file is probably not packed or compressed. Strings can be identified, and in the IMAGE_SECTION_HEADER the raw data size roughly corresponds to the virtual data size. This should enable us to read the strings used in the program code without using a software reverse engineering framework like Ghidra....

Download challenges: Neuland CTF Repository This is fine - Easy We get what appears to be a typical JPG image. Metadata is one of the first places to look for steganography. In this case, the flag is hidden in the Exif tag Flash maker. Exif is a standard format for storing metadata in digital images. The tag can be viewed using the strings or exif command on Linux or the Explorer Properties on Windows....

Download challenges: Neuland CTF Repository Obfuscation 1 - Easy Obfuscation-1.js The title of the challenge already gives us an indication of the correct solution. Obfuscation is used in programming to make source code more difficult for humans to read and to prevent recovery. If we look at the obfuscated JavaScript file, the first thing that catches our eye is an array with several strings. Based on the backslashes and format, this is ASCII code presented in hexadecimal format....

Scavenger hunt - Easy Can you find all the pieces of the flag? The first part of the flag can be found in the website’s page source in the header metatag content. The second part of the flag is hidden in a cookie called “flag”. The last part of the flag is hidden in the robots.txt file. This file can be used to specify whether and how the website may be visited by a web crawler....