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Redaction gone wrong

  • Description: Now you DON'T see me. This report has some critical data in it, some of which have been redacted correctly, while some were not. Can you find an important key that was not redacted properly?
  • Difficulty: Medium

🔎 Solution​

This challenge provides a PDF file, but parts of it appear to be redacted with black boxes. A simple trick to reveal the hidden content is to press Ctrl + A to select all text, then copy and paste it into a plain text editor. By doing so, the full content becomes visible-including the supposedly redacted parts. Among the revealed text, we find the flag:

Financial Report for ABC Labs, Kigali, Rwanda for the year 2021.  
Breakdown - Just painted over in MS word.  
Cost Benefit Analysis 
Credit Debit 
This is not the flag, keep looking 
Expenses from the    
picoCTF{C4n_Y0u_S33_m3_fully} 
Redacted document.

That's it. Just some paint over a Word document pretending to be secure.

🚩Flag​

picoCTF{C4n_Y0u_S33_m3_fully}