InfoSec Institute CTF Challenge #9

Another day, another challenge…

Today’s challenge will be #9 from the InfoSec Institute CTF.

Going HERE we’re presented with the following:

Doing our handy source of right clicking viewing the page source we see the following:

We see that there’s a form that takes a username and password.

Using the hint from the challenge we know we’re looking for a CISCO IDS login.

Going to Google and typing in “common username and password for CISCO IDS” we’re presented with the following link.

Searching the link for username and passwords we see the following:

Going back to our login screen and entering the first username of “netangr” and password “attack” we get the following:

The username and password didn’t work 🙁

Let’s try the second username of “root” and password of “attack”.

We’re presented with the flag… but it looks like gibberish.

Inspecting the flag closely we noticed that it is backwards.

The flag is infosec_flagis_defaultpass!

Lesson learned:

Our handy trick of looking at the page source did not work. It revealed that challenge was using a form. Looking at the webpage we noticed that there is a hint – CISCO IDS. Using this information we know that most devices have a default username and password. Going to Google we found the webpage that listed a default username and password. The first username did not work, second one did. From that we found the flag even though to the naked eye one might ignore it. Looking at the flag again we noticed that the flag was written backwards. After putting the flag in the correct order we were able to see it.