Challenge 7: Stego 1 - Hsanokklis/2022-2023-Tech-journal GitHub Wiki
Cyber Command: The hackers have hidden a message in this image. Find out what it is.
Image:
Answer: SKY-TVJI-2063
Methods used:
I first started by looking at the meta data in the image to see if anything stood out that I could decode as a flag. Nothing stood out to me so I used a website that gave me tips for finding flags in images. I ended up using my Kali Linux VM to run commands in the terminal because it was just easier to install things and some of the commands didn't work in the windows command line. Using the website I found as a guide, I typed these commands into the command line:
Before I typed in the commands I needed to be in the directory that the image was in. To do this I just typed in ls to list the directories and then typed cd Desktop to go to the directory.
file hello.jpg
- This command didn't come up with anything that I could tell
exiftool hello.jpg
- I needed to install this in my Kali with the command sudo apt install libimage-exitool-perl -y I tried this a few times and it just coming up with an error message when I tried to execute the command so I gave up on this one. The command was suppose to display a lot of the metadata of the image, and within this meta data there would be a comment section that would most likely have contained the flag.
xxd
- I ran this, but really didn't understand what I was looking at when I ran it. The xxd command allows you to take a file and dump it in a hexadecimal format. Sometimes there will be comprehensible words when this is done, but a lot of times challenges are not as straight forward.
strings
- this command prints out strings of 4 characters contained in the file. This seemed like the most promising method. I actually was not able to find the flag and had to click on the solution. They used this strings method. They typed in strings hello.jpg | grep SKY. I am not sure what the | grep SKY means, but when I typed it in, the out was the only string that contained SKY, so I assume the command outputs the specific thing you want it to. I didn't know what the flag was suppose to be and I wasn't sure how I was suppose to know that SKY was going to be in the flag. I was overall a little confused by this challenge, but I am glad I found a good website that has commands for flags in images.