Hey Hacklido fam! sagnik17 back with another sneaky forensics challenge, this one hides in plain sight in the most unexpected way 😄
What we got ?
A plain old message.txt. Boring right? Running cat on it just showed some text and… a suspicious amount of whitespace. Something’s off 👀
cat message.txt
The hint drops here 💡
The challenge hinted at Ctrl+A, so I opened it in VS Code and selected everything. Suddenly all these tabs and spaces lit up at line no 7 that weren’t visible before 👁️
then confirmed it in the terminal too
cat -A message.txt
Those ^I symbols? That’s how Linux represents Tab characters. Sneaky sneaky 😏
The hint spelled it out
So the invisible whitespace was actually binary data the whole time! Classic whitespace steganography 🤯
Scripting it out 🐍
Wrote a quick python script to extract and convert:
with open("message.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8") as f:
data = f.read()
hidden = ''.join(c for c in data if c in (' ', '\t'))
binary = ''.join('0' if c == ' ' else '1' for c in hidden)
print("Hidden binary:", binary)
Grabbed the binary output → threw it into CyberChef → flag unlocked 🚩🔥
see you in the next writeup!
