Ouija

Info

• Url: https://app.hackthebox.com/challenges/Ouija
• Platform: HackTheBox
• Complexity Level: Easy
• Date: 2025-03-17
• Tools: IDA, HxD

Objective

You’ve made contact with a spirit from beyond the grave! Unfortunately, they speak in an ancient tongue of flags, so you can’t understand a word. You’ve enlisted a medium who can translate it, but they like to take their time…

Workflow

Looking at the file it looks like an ELF binary. Opening it in Linux will result in a slow script generating the flag

Looking at the code in IDA, the main script uses a lot of sleeps to get around the code.

We got sleeps with 10 as value; but also 1 as a value. Changing these to 0 seconds sleeps would speed it up drastically.

Using HxD to change the hex values bf01000000 and bf0a000000 to bf00000000 helps us run the script in an instant. resulting in letters being generated;

putting all these letters togethers gives us the flag HTB{Sleping_is_not_obfuscation}