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The Numbers

  • Description: The numbers... what do they mean?
  • Difficulty: Easy

🔎 Solution​

In this challenge, we are provided with an image containing a sequence of numbers.

16 9 3 15 3 20 6 {20 8 5 14 21 13 2 5 18 19 13 1 19 15 14}

At first, I attempted to interpret these numbers as ASCII codes by converting them using different bases (decimal, hexadecimal, binary,...), but none of the conversions produced meaningful output. So, I started to consider alternative possibilities.

Notably, all the numbers in the image are relatively small-each less than 20. This led me to suspect that they might represent positions of letters in the English alphabet, where A = 1, B = 2, ..., Z = 26.

To speed things up, I used this tool that maps numerical positions to letters. Upon entering the sequence, the output revealed the correct flag.

🚩Flag​

picoCTF{THENUMBERSMASON}