Beginners Quest (Google CTF) - 1° Letter

Hello hello hello hello

A my FRIEND let me to know this nice kind of challenge CALLLLLLLLED

https://capturetheflag.withgoogle.com

The most important aspect of this post is: if you Click Logo to Enter, nothing happens, because this image is not linked to any website and because I'm wicked. You could say: "Then, why didn't cut the "Click Logo to Enter" text from the image?" and I could answer: "Because it's funny and nonsense and I'm crazy and you too since you are here".

ANYWAY

Used tools:

• pdftotext (extract text from pdf)

I will use my space to show solutions for these quests and sometimes I will use sources to report the smartest/most elegant solution. The reason is THAT these posts don't intend just to show the solution but to learn new Linux commands/tools to face similar challenges and acquire MORE & MORE KNOWLEDGE

The story of the beginner quests orbit around a CAKE. Do you know? A FKIN CAKE! A VERY GOOD CAKE :-Q... CAKE

(CAKE)

Ok, stop this. (cake)

The purpose of this adventure is to find the CAKE (sorry, it's not my fault now) and show it to the world. I don't report all the nice story otherwise I don't end. This adventure is composed of several challenges inside the following "map"

Each circle represents a challenge (Beginner Level). To reach the target, we can follow different paths. My personal purpose is to report ALL the challenges. Let's BEGIN (like Beginner ahaha -.-) with the FIRST challenge:

I suppose we are working on a Linux machine. Here we have to download the Attachment that is a compressed file containing a .pdf file where credentials are written in "obscured" way (what a genius!).
Typing:

• file 5a0fad5699f75dee39434cc26587411b948e0574a545ef4157e5bf4700e9d62a 

we see that it is a .zip file. So rename the compressed file with a short name by:

• mv 5a0fad5699f75dee39434cc26587411b948e0574a545ef4157e5bf4700e9d62a Letter.zip

Then we can uncompress it by:

• unzip Letter.zip

This easy challenge can be solved opening the pdf file "challenge.pdf", copy the part of the credentials text and paste on a Notepad or other text editors (like Sublime Text). You will get the right key to submit for the challenge.
Some pdf viewers (like evince) can show directly the credentials if you highlight the "obscured" text by the mouse cursor.
Another way is to use the pdftotext command:

• pdftotext challenge.pdf
• cat challenge.txt

and you will get the text in clear with the key that you need.

If you want to be SPOILED for the solution key, just click below

CTF{ICanReadDis}

Some solution has the following source: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVeW9qkBjo3zosnqUbG7CFw