Puzzle #4 Web Vulnerabilities

Girls Go CyberStart is a fun series of cyber challenges where a curious mind and a willingness to try are your best tools. You don’t need any cybersecurity background to succeed! But if you like to warm up your cyber muscles before a race, these Practice Puzzles will give you a look at the types of challenges in GGCS along with tips and tricks to solving them. You could be solving challenges like these soon! Find out more and register here, competition play starts January 13.

Web pages are a wonderful source of easily accessible information. But when the web page developer doesn’t have security in mind while creating the code, the result can be vulnerabilities that leave the site open to hackers.

To help you practice finding web vulnerabilities, we’ve created a very special website, Hack To The Future, that has 9 challenges, each with a flag for you to find. A flag is a string of characters, symbols and numbers that often spell out something funny. Example: FL@g$_D0nT_Sl33p!

Let’s make it a bit more fun with some hints:

1. Flag #1: Color is a smart method to hide things
2. Flag #2: A way that websites say “Hey web crawler, don’t scan this part!”
3. Flag #3: To find something right in front of you, sometimes you need to go to the (View) Source
4. Flag #4: You just need to be patient with the master of data hiding
5. Flag #5: What happens if you right-click that cracked Avatar and open it in a new tab? Can you fix it?
6. Flag #6: When you Inspect a web page, you should look past the Elements. There’s so many more tabs to explore!
7. Flag #7: To get an admin message, go big in your script 😉
8. Flag #8: This one will take an eye for the small detail + a touch of encoding
9. Flag #9: Scripts can hide secrets, but can you make them function?

Solutions will be posted one at a time over the next week or two. Is there one driving you crazy? Post a Club of the Week pic along with the Flag number and #GirlsGoCyberStart — and I’ll reply with an extra hint!