hackertest.net level 8 :: Open PSD

by Arxleol on Tuesday 27.01.2009, under hackertest.net, tutorial

In the last mission we learned something about stenography you may always read more on wikipedia. Now we will go further on this way, no to disclose you solution in the first few words let’s check the source and follow proper hacker procedures.

Examining the source code (or just trying to type in something in the form) will open new page php page. Let’s do that now, as you may see new page is opened ultimatly providing us with information about wrong password. Nonetheles, examining source code should become you natural practice. I’ll give you hint you should look for the body tag in the code. If you find body tag it will contain following code.

<BODY BGCOLOR="ffffff" TEXT="000000" BG="images/phat.gif">

It looks similar like in the previous mission we have some image included for the background. Opening this image should be easy let’s just type the address in the browser URL bar and open it. Your URL should look like this to open it.

http://www.hackertest.net/images/phat.gif

Just as in the previous mission we have image, if you have large enough monitor you may notice small text in the lower right corner of the screen. It says: Look for a.PhotoShopDocument

Since I am not some graphic genius and it is not my thing I’ve googled for extension of the photo shop document and found out that the extension for photoshop document is PSD as you can see hint was provided by writers of this challenge since uppercase letters form abbreviation PSD. Let’s search for psd file on the site. First thing crossing my mind was to open image folder on the site, and I tried it by entering following URL.

http://www.hackertest.net/images/

This didn’t produced any significant result but more or less funny you should try it out. OK back to business another logical thing was to try and change extension of the file phat.gif to phat.psd Like this:

http://www.hackertest.net/images/phat.psd

You are able to save file from the site now. You can also open this file with any other text editor and I have tried to search something in the code of the file but to shorten your time there are no significant hints there. Why did I tried this at the first place? Well, answer is simple I figured that since photoshop is so expansive thing to come with people would hide password and username in the code of the PSD file, which eventually showed to be wrong premises on my part. Now I needed some support for the photoshop files in Windows Vista (as a matter of fact this is my OS of choice) and I’ve found it in paint.net it is free and easy to use. You can also check my tutorial on how to add PSD support in the program Paint.net since the one is not provided in the basic freely downloadable package.

If you have everything configured as it should be you will be able to open PSD file with Paint.net. Let’s do this. (Note to all of you who are using any other program to open psd file, rest of this tutorial will be based around Paint.net but nonetheless if you continue reading it will probably give you enough hints to find password and username in the programs of your choice.)

hackertest.net level8 psd file

You will probably something like this. If you are unable to open psd file with Paint.net then you probably doesn’t have it configured right and you should read tutorial I mentioned before.

As you may notice There are many layers on this image to control layers in the paint you use utility that is shown in the lower right corner of the screen.

Paint.net PSD layers

With this simple utility you can easily transform this image and show or hide different layers on the picture to see if anything changes and if there are any hints revealed.

If you hide first level in the list that is level too many watermarks, this is easily done by pressing on the check box next to the name of level. Now let’s continue until we find some useful data.

If you remove all levels except the level named DEMO DEMO DEMO DEMO DEMO you will see username and password.

Now let’s return to the level 8 form at:

http://www.hackertest.net/phat.php

You can enter username: zadmin and password: stebbins to proceed to the next level.

For any questions feedbacks and almost everything else you may write in the comments I will make sure to read them and answer.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
				Feb »
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

Axino.net