WEEKDAY CHALLENGE: Encoding · The Black Widow Community

Bree Kagwe

10d (edited) • ⚔️ Challenges

WEEKDAY CHALLENGE: Encoding

Today, I have few words. All I want to see are your ethical hacking skills.

⚠️WARNING⚠️

Spoilers in the comment section, if I was you I would have my answer prepared to copy/paste before looking at how other people answered this to see the difference in your thinking even with the same right answer.

Challenge starts below this line of text.

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While poking around a deliberately vulnerable machine, you find a hidden file tucked in a forgotten directory. Inside is a single cryptic string, like someone left a clue:

aGVsbG93b3JsZDEx

Your goal is to:

Decode it. What's the plain text hiding underneath, and how did you crack it open?
Identify the encoding. What clues (character set, length) told you what type of encoding it is?
Explain why it's not a hash, even though it looks random.

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Goodluck

~ ascriptkiddie

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WEEKDAY CHALLENGE: Encoding