Rating:
~~~THE TASK~~~
Zombies got communication-problems because of their heterogeneity, so they defined a standard for their communication. We need to know how to decrypt their messages in order to successfully defeat them. Luckily, a friend of mine found one of those encrypted messages:
0x1be15dc
77676058612
03062372
676
0x9542
0x2546c9ec
02614610
0x3b3154e5a0a923ff
Hint: uppercase seems legit.
credits: 100 +3 (1st), +2 (2nd), +1 (3rd)
~~~THE SOLUTION~~~
We see here some words, which are represented by 16-, 10- and 8-digit integers.
Let's transform these integers, so each of them would be 36-digit. So, we get:
17 14 21 21 24
35 24 22 11 18 14 28
17 14 27 14
18 28
29 17 14
10 12 12 14 28 28
15 21 10 16
32 14 21 24 31 14 11 27 10 18 24 0
Each of the 'digits' may represent a digit (0-9) or an uppercase letter (A-Z). We know, that uppercase letters are legit. So, we try to find out the correspondence between our 'digits' and these letters.
We suppose that the first string is HELLO, so we get:
H - 17
E - 14
L - 21
O - 24
We also think about rather a rare combination of double letters
10 12 12 14 28 28
and this appears to be ACCESS.
So:
A - 10
C - 12
S - 28
Finally, we see, that each letter corresponds to the number
9+i
where i is the place of this latter in the alphabet.
The whole message is:
HELLO
ZOMBIES
HERE
IS
THE
ACCESS
FLAG
WELOVEBRAIN0
(the final zero is strange).
We try WELOVEBRAIN0 and WELOVEBRAIN, but get a mistake. After a few attempts we find out that the flag is WELOVEBRAINZ.
