Kick31.zip May 2026

# Brute‑force short printable strings (1‑6 chars) charset = string.printable.strip() # remove whitespace for length in range(1, 7): for candidate in itertools.product(charset, repeat=length): s = ''.join(candidate) if hashlib.md5(s.encode()).digest() == target: print("[+] Found key:", s) raise SystemExit Running the script yields:

Challenge category: Reverse Engineering / Forensics Difficulty: Medium Points: 250 (typical) The file kick31.zip is a password‑protected ZIP archive. Inside the archive there is a single file named kick31.bin . The goal is to retrieve the flag hidden somewhere in the binary. kick31.zip

#!/usr/bin/env python3 import hashlib import itertools import string 7): for candidate in itertools.product(charset

target = bytes.fromhex('7a3d5e1f9ab8c4026d550af1337c8ee2') kick31.zip

$ john --wordlist=rockyou.txt kick31.hash After a few seconds John reports: