Category: Forensics
Points: 50
Author: Prince Niyonshuti N.
Hi, intrepid investigator! 📄🔍 You've stumbled upon a peculiar PDF filled with what seems like nothing more than garbled nonsense. But beware! Not everything is as it appears. Amidst the chaos lies a hidden treasure—an elusive flag waiting to be uncovered. Find the PDF file here Hidden Confidential Document and uncover the flag within the metadata.
1: Don't be fooled by the visible text; it’s just a decoy!
2: Look beyond the surface for hidden clues
We start the challenge with a pdf file. Since the challenge is forensics, the first instinct to have is to check the file metadata. To do this, we will use the appexiftool.
We see that the value of Author is base64 encoded. By using online decoding tools like dcode or cyberchef, we obtain the flag: picoCTF{REDACTED}.
GG!