There are a bunch of fantastic Capture The Flag security challenges on RingZer0Team.com. I've been working through some of these for a wee while now, and with the New Zealand Cyber Security Challenge coming up again soon, I thought I'd get back into some of them.

Challenge 148 ("Sysadmin Linux Level 2") is one of a series of challenges where you're trying to breach the security of a Linux system. I actually finished most of these last year, but I wanted to finish my last two. Of course, to …

This is a continuation of my series on RingZer0Team.com.

Challenge 57 ("Hash Breaker Reloaded", under the Coding Challenges) is one of a series of challenges where you're simply presented with a hash - you need to return the plaintext value to the page within 3 seconds.

In contrast to Challenge 56, this challenge also includes a salt:

You have 3 seconds to break this hash
Send the answer back using https://ringzer0team.com/challenges/57/[clear_text]


----- BEGIN HASH -----
ab9507edbb2501b3c02e47c51af0178d68655980
----- END HASH -----

----- BEGIN SALT -----
c2ac9d8d004b4011d0864e76c7ebaaccfd18464bb8ff66bdbf19a703eb95a944
----- END SALT -----

The hash looks like …

There are a bunch of fantastic Capture The Flag security challenges on RingZer0Team.com. I've been working through some of these for a wee while now, and with the New Zealand Cyber Security Challenge coming up again soon, I thought I'd get back into some of them.

Challenge 56 ("Hash Breaker", under the Coding Challenges) is one of a series of challenges where you're simply presented with a hash - you need to return the plaintext value to the page within 3 seconds.

Of course, this is impossible to do manually …