• Introduction
• Learning Journey

Introduction

H4ck1ng G00gl3 is a series of security challenges published on October 2022 where the only way to win is to think like a hacker. In this post, I explain how I solved ep005 challenge 03. Category Misc.

Learning Journey

For this challenge, we don’t have any data. We have to find the secret message hidden in the episodes. I opened all the episodes in different browser tabs and looked at each introduction. I searched for colours, letters, keywords and any information I could see on the screen. Besides, I was carefully listening to the storyteller. After a couple of hours of watching the introductions in a loop, I asked the community for help.

It turns out that there is a message in morse. In each episode’s introduction, around the time when a person enters and sits on the chair, some high-frequency sounds start to play. It never occurred to me that it could be morse. In any case, I decreased the video speed to 0.25 and started taking notes.

I transformed morse into English and copied the link on the browser. It didn’t work. I was stuck for a while here checking the episodes and my notes. The problem was that they made a mistake and put the same message in two episodes. I found out by asking the community. After fixing that, I managed to get the last flag.

With that, we completed the challenge and the entire series.