Answers for edition 2023

1. Morse

   The first exercise was a relative easy one. In Morse code the following URL was spelled: step1.jotihack.com. By going to this URL, you went to the next exercise

2. Encrypted

   Then you were shown a text with random numbers and letters. Here the clue was an image of "Ceasar" and a "Key". The Caesar key, also known as a Caesar cipher, is a piece of text in which all letters are replaced by another letter. The best-known variant of this is ROT-13 where all letters in the Alphabet are moved 13 positions. So A -> N, B -> O, C -> P, etc. If you translated the text you ended up with /9a782d40768eb9007786a032az7911zz.

3. Inspect

   On the page you arrived at you were shown a magnifying glass as a hint. Here are actually 2 assignments combined into 1. Here you had to look at the source code of the page itself. You saw that you had to remember "B!lb0", and that the following link was in the DNS zone of the URL where the image was located. You could solve this with the command: dig TXT inspect-element.jotihack.com You will then see the URL: https://jotihack.com/supersecret.

4. Deep inside

   The super secret image, also known as the Corona Lisa, you were shown an image of the Mona Lisa with a face mask. The hint here was "Some images have more content than you expect". If you opened the image with a text editor you would see the URL to the following command at the bottom of the file: https://corona-lisa.jotihack.com

5. Portway

   On the Corona-lisa page you only saw the hint ":10293". When you connect to a website, you normally use 2 different "ports": 80 and 443. But did you know that you can also connect to a browser using other ports? So you had to go to the following URL: https://jotihack.com:10293

6. Server

   On port 10293 you saw something called a terminal. Here, first of all, you had to try to log in as an administrator to access the next command. If you have read the "instructions.txt" file you will also have seen that you need "telnet" for a later command. To log in as an administrator you need the administrator password. You were able to read this in the step with the magnifying glass. By entering the command su B!lb0 you became an administrator

7. Goldmine

   As an administrator, you can then search the files on the server. After some digging you found a file in /Users/Thorin/gold.txt. It stated that he had come across a mountain of gold with fake coins and only 1 real coin. In /var/local/goldpile/ there were 10 files whose contents kept changing, except for 1 file: goldcoin43.txt. This contained the following text in base64 encoded: jotihack.com 43. By connecting to this with Telnet (see previous step) you arrived at the following command

8. Cheating

   If you were telnet connected to jotihack.com on port 43 you should try to log in and play with the statuses you were in. The username and password were easy, because they were presented to you right away: Username = joti, and password = jota. Then you had to play with the state, because some commands were only available to "administrators" and some only to "regular users". You could retrieve all states using the states command. You could then change your state via state=elevated, or indicate a different state from the list shown. As an administrator you could find out the files that were on the server. 1 of the files was a list of all commands. You could read this by running the following command: file answers.txt The file contained the following link: jotihack.com/666cfce95597723d976bc5e8fef06db9351ea375/JOTIHACK to the last step.

9. Coordinates

   The last step showed you a video telling you to find the coordinates where the jotihack.com server was located and complete them to get a URL. You could look this up in different ways. The most useful thing was to see which company owned the server by looking up information about the IP address. Here you arrive at TransIP. However, they use 2 different data centers. If you run a WHOIS command on the IP address, you will see more information about the network itself. Here you can see that the range itself is registered in Amsterdam, but via the netname you can see that it was actually in the data center in Alblasserdam: netname: TRANSIP-NL-VPS-POD0-RTM0-CUSTOMERS. (RTM0 is the name for the data center in Alblasserdam). With a little searching you could find out that the data center in Alblasserdam is the Dataplace data center. You had to round the coordinates of the building to 3 decimal places (as indicated in the video). You could find out the coordinates using Google Maps. These are WGS84 coordinates, and after rounding you ended up at https://jotihack.com/51.846,4.679

10. Email

    As the very last step, you had to send the code with correct information to [email protected] to receive a price.