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How to play

One should seek mail addresses of the following form: thc-2025-flag-<large-random-string-flag>@m0rgan.net.

Please report your achievements by sending a mail to the given addresses.

Make sure to include nick{your super fancy nickname} in the subject field to set your nickname in the scoreboard.

/!\ If you do not proceed as such, your validation email will be discarded.

The first challenger reporting the last flag will be considered as the winner, hence scalping fame and rewards. Nevertheless the remaining most proficient participants will also be rewarded with valuable swag.

The winner will also have the opportunity to present his write up in a dedicated slot of the conference.

Here is how you get dragged into this adventure: In the year of our Lord 2125, in the midst of an economic crisis, The mayor of THCity, leader of The Aurora Initiative, intercepts a disturbing message and asks private investigators to look into the matter so as not to arouse suspicion. You are one of these private investigators and really want to get the reward by being the first to give some answers to the Specialized Neutralization and Action Force Unit (the secret Service of THCity) on what in the world is going on.

Aurora Initiative is at (cyber) war with the Xtream Scanvenger Squad hacker group, lead by Viktor LaGraine aka "The Butcher". Aurora Initiative expects a massive attack against public infrastructure very soon...

Your mission, if you accept it, is to prevent this attack from succeeding as well as gathering the most information you can about their future malicious plans.

The intercepted "message" has been set as a website hosted on a temporary public server. It is written in zyph’kethu, a language used in the barren lands outside of THCity which uses lowercase alphabetical characters.

Tips (because it's just a game after all):

• Step 0: go back to it it has been simplified (19/03/2025)
• Step 3: please pay attention to the fact that UDP transport protocol does not guarantee reception and handling of datagrams, especially when facing congestion in receiver...
• Step 3: pay attention to the fact that the challenge leverages a tap interface. Meaning that all the networking happens into a linux process (as qemu user network does). Consider that you enter into a network using tap ip address (it will be your source ip) and all the rest (network and host(s)) is handled by the challenge binary.

Hall of fame

May they be recognized