$ hexdump -C hidden.bin | head 00000000 42 49 4e 41 52 59 20 66 69 6c 65 20 73 69 67 6e |BINARY file sign| 00000010 61 74 75 72 65 20 70 72 6f 74 65 63 74 65 64 20 |ature protected | ... The first bytes read – looks like a custom marker added by the challenge creator. 5.2 Entropy check – is it compressed / encrypted? $ ent hidden.bin Entropy = 7.998997 bits per byte. Very high entropy (~8 bits/byte) – it is either compressed or encrypted. 5.3 Try common decompression tools We test a few common formats with binwalk :
2 00:00:03,001 --> 00:00:07,000 Enjoy the movie. Nothing hidden in the subtitles – just a generic welcome message. We quickly glance at them with ffprobe just to be sure there’s nothing weird: The Khatrimaza-org-mkv
$ mediainfo khatrimaza-org.mkv General Complete name : khatrimaza-org.mkv Format : Matroska File size : 84.3 MiB Duration : 00:03:45.000 Overall bit rate : 2 028 kb/s $ hexdump -C hidden
ffprobe -show_streams video.h264 ffprobe -show_streams audio.aac Both streams look clean (no extra data or unusual codec parameters). We also run strings on them, but no flag‑like patterns appear. $ ent hidden