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I will simply intorduce the new challenge, as I don’t want to give away any unintentional hints.
Permanent link: [Article]-It Happened One Friday
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[/align:182mo5t0]Overview: Hello, challenge fans. Matt Carpenter and I have brewed up a new one for your analysis. The evidence is below. Analyze it and answer our questions. As always, we’ll choose three winners: one technical champ, one creative victor whose answer is technically correct, and one lucky person chosen at random. As you work through this challenge, please observe this very important warning! As they say on TV, DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. We’ll go even further by saying, DO NOT TRY IT AT WORK EITHER. The commands included in this challenge are _highly_ destructive, and some of them are hardware specific. They will hose a machine badly. If you insist on testing the commands, at least use a strongly virtualized environment that isolates virtual hardware from physical hardware, and set a snapshot before each command so that you can revert to a pristine state. We wrote the challenge using VMware Workstation, and did not suffer damage to our underlying hosts. However, we cannot guarantee that your VMware experience will match our own. In other words, to borrow from the TV vernacular yet again, YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY. Furthermore, some so-called “virtualized environments” other than VMware are merely emulators that do not isolate hardware well, nor do they support snapshots. The commands below could damage such environments, so be very careful. You have been warned!
If you can’t answer this challenge 100%, still send something in to qualify as a random winner. This month’s prize is my book, Malware: Fighting Malicious Code, which I authored with Lenny Zeltser. Each winner gets a signed copy.
–Ed Skoudis, Intelguardians
Author, Counter Hack Reloaded
Have fun and good luck,
Don -
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Hey All,
On what day was this challenge released? I ask this rhetorical question for a reason. We have had a number of entries address the “What,” yet none of them so far have done more than scratch the service of the “Why.”
So maybe we did hide the theme a little too much this time. So I’ll hopefully help out a little:
– First of all, just because there is no narrative in this challenge does not mean that there is not a story being told with characters and intentions.
– Secondly, every challenge has had a theme, and it has almost always been a movie. This one is no different.
– If you read back on some of Ed’s other challenges and especially his detailed answers, you should know full well that he is utterly incapable of doing anything without multiple levels of deeper meaning. Sometimes it’s personal, sometimes it’s humorous… but it’s always there in an Ed Skoudis challenge no matter how small it may seem. Explore Everything!!
– I normally create the artwork to closely match the theme and/or title of the challenge, but I was pulled back from this one for fear that I would give away too much. Although extremely subtle, even the picture has a hint… or 2.Anyone who has submitted an answer thus far will be allowed to submit another answer with the above items in mind. There are no rules against working in teams. We may not have enough signed books to go around, but don’t let that stop you.
Good luck as we only have 10 days left,
Don -
Nicely said, Don. There’s much to chew on in the challenge, and I think people will have fun with it. We try to write these challenges so that people learn new things while working on them. Don’t be intimidated, even if you aren’t a Linux command-line person. Just start working on it, and see where it leads. You’ve got a little over a week to send in your answers. I’d love to see what you guys come up with.
–Ed Skoudis.
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