About this experiment
- This is an experiment to collect feedback from CTF players and cybersecurity enthusiasts regarding a CTF task specifically designed to avoid automated solving with AI.
- This task can be solved without AI.
- The goal is to determine whether the key principles behind this challenge make sense and whether they lead to an enjoyable experience, even when AI is involved in the solving process.
- To participate, solve the challenge below by reconstructing the original file and complete the feedback survey — you can also send a private message to @virtualabs on Mastodon.
- Share this page with others. The more people play it and give feedback, the more complete and meaningful the collected data will be.
The challenge
A new piece of ransomware was recently discovered. It appeared to have encrypted all the files on a computer. After analyzing the malware's code, it turns out the authors didn't actually use encryption. Instead, their algorithm "scrambles" file contents by splitting them into fixed-size blocks and rearranging them to make the data unreadable. The malware randomly picks a block size for each file it scrambles, and unfortunately we're unable to determine it with the information we have.
The scrambled files keep their original size, but the malware removes their extensions.
Would you be able to reconstruct the original file from this "scrambled" one?
Feedback survey
Once you've solved the challenge, please take a moment to fill in the feedback survey — it only takes a few minutes and helps a lot.