Tags: misc 

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# The Mueller Report

We're given a 138.8 MB PDF file. However, it doesn't seem to contain any pages.

![](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shawnduong/ctf-writeups/master/2019-ANGSTROM/images/the-mueller-report-1.png)

Perhaps there's something contained within the actual file itself, not the pages. Let's try running `strings` and `grep` to see if anything in there resembles the flag.

```
$ strings full-mueller-report.pdf | grep "actf{.*}"
```

`strings` extracts all strings out of there, filtering out binary nonsense and sequences without any sort of corresponding or printable characters. `grep` performs a regular expression operation. Our expression wants anythng that starts with `actf{`, can have anything afterwards, so as long as it ends with a `}`. The pipe redirects the output from `strings` directly into `grep`.

![](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shawnduong/ctf-writeups/master/2019-ANGSTROM/images/the-mueller-report-2.png)

Original writeup (https://github.com/shawnduong/ctf-writeups/blob/master/2019-ANGSTROM/Misc/the-mueller-report.md).