Burot

👶 EPT Got talent? 👶

Writeup author: Snorkfröken

Solution

When we first read the challenge description we get 2 hints.

1. "... But where would they hide a .secret?"

the ".secret" is the important part here which suggests that we are looking for a hidden file. we also get a 2nd hint

2. "Hint: The flag is hidden on your teams EPT Box™"

This is pretty straight forward so after following the instructions on https://ctf.ept.gg/ept-box we are presented with this Text in our terminal

Finding the .secret file

Since we know that we are looking for a hidden file we can use the linux command

ls -la (ls shows all files and -la shows all the hidden files) this results in all the files and hidden files that are accessible from the base directory showing up.

Here we also see the total number of files 56 going through them all would take a long time so we are better off creating a bash script to find the flag for us.

first we need to make a new file with the Linux command
touch <file_name> lets call it find_flag.sh (.sh for bash file)

we can now make sure our file was created correctly by doing ls -la again.

After we have created the file we use the linux command
chmod +x find_flag.sh -This will give our newly created file execute permissions.

Then we open the file and insert our written code using our chosen method I will use vim

vim find_flag.sh

press i to go to insert mode and be able to write and then :wq to save and quit (write+quit)

then we run the script with the linux command

source find_flag.sh

this then shows us where the .secret file is located in "/dev/shm/ .secret"

we can then simply navigate into the shm directory by doing

cd /dev/shm/

and since we know that the hidden file .secret exists there we can do

ls -la again which shows us the file .secret

we can then open the file with a linux command that opens a file

vim .secret

and the flag is displayed