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Big Zip

  • Description: Unzip this archive and find the flag.
  • Difficulty: Easy

🔎 Solution​

After extracting the zip archive, we discover a massive collection of files and directories - a total of 3076 items.

┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~/Desktop]
└─$ ls -la big-zip-files    
total 3076
drwxrwxr-x 121 kali kali 36864 May  3  2020 .
drwxr-xr-x   7 kali kali  4096 May 24 10:15 ..
-rw-rw-r--   1 kali kali    88 May  3  2020 acurqdgqyoi.txt
-rw-rw-r--   1 kali kali    87 May  3  2020 aecwqhyouxkugpjtn.txt
-rw-rw-r--   1 kali kali    88 May  3  2020 agkahcbvobe.txt

To locate the flag string that follows the picoCTF format, we use the grep command with the -r option. The -r flag (short for --recursive) tells grep to search through all files and directories recursively, making it ideal for scanning through large nested structures like this one.

grep -r "picoCTF"

The result points us to the file containing the flag:

big-zip-files/folder_pmbymkjcya/folder_cawigcwvgv/folder_ltdayfmktr/folder_fnpfclfyee/whzxrpivpqld.txt:information on the record will last a billion years. Genes and brains and books encode picoCTF{gr3p_15_m4g1c_ef8790dc}

🚩Flag​

picoCTF{gr3p_15_m4g1c_ef8790dc}