This challenge was part of the hardware category, and was pretty interesting. Here is the challenge description:

One of our enhanced radio telescopes captured some weird fluctuations from a nearby star. It was idle for decades due to the fact that it was fully enclosed by a Dyson Sphere but its patterns began to change drastically leading us to believe that someone is controlling part of the megastructure to release energy and send these pulses directed to us in order to transmit a message. They must have known that our equipment can read even the slightest fluctuations.

This was the first web challenge I solved in the Cyber Apocalypse 2022 CTF. This challenge had a downloadable portion with a fake flag as well as a web instance with an actual flag. Since the CTF has been over for a while and I didn't capture any of the actual challenge, I am recreating the steps I took here using the docker container.

Recon

First, I took a look at the challenge in a browser.

I recently competed in the Cyber Apocalypse 2022 CTF on Hackthebox. This was a really fun experience (and my first ever live CTF). I only solved a few challenges (which I'll be writing in subsequent posts), but there was one vexating challenge which I wasn't able to complete. I kinda had the right idea, but I was missing some key pieces of information. The point of this post is to explain what I was missing and how it works (and to document how I would have done it).