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Level Effect Cyber Defense CTF Write-up - Email Security Challenges (4/4 completeness)

Table of Contents


Identity crisis (100 points)

1e4f2c69744d83c6c73ac5325e0a1392.png We've been tricked, lied to, and quite possibly, bamboozled.

Who is the actual sender of this phishing email? (provide the email address)

content.txt


17311c60573335baec50bf797ce8d044.png

provided text file is actually eml file in disguised which mean it contains email header which should contain actual email sender in "Return-Path" as you can see right there

bartholomewbelet810@gmail.com

Safe for skin safe for emails... (100 points)

1db971fe2c9ddab60a773a1753333ab7.png I keep more than your skin safe. 😀


6bd0f9419b69bb3beaa65192f6be27e2.png Well... This one is a well known protocol for email security

a785c8f6aaa21032d52bf900a01998f9.png

which has the same abbreviation as Sun Protection Skin which make challenge details made sense somehow

SPF

Out phishing (150 points)

5e7bbe26a047c8a912e3e7111675c1b3.png A Goodcorp employee recently reported a phishing attempt to his company email address. We've provided the email headers for you to analyze. What country is the original sending server hosted in?

out_phishing.txt


26305a174216eb857abb24fed020ff51.png

We got an eml file in disguised again, now we can acquire an SMTP address of an email sender right there

5e64b0d5c5e21cf16fe9ea831210fc26.png

By using IPLocation or IP2Location API, we can see that this IP address is from Lithuania

Lithuania

2045th trick in the book (200 points)

2446ec5c60184ef73066c5428a56ce47.png This is a common encoding system that phishers abuse in their endless quest to bypass email scanners. Can you figure out what it is?

=C6=96=D0=B5=CE=BD=D0=B5=C6=96=D0=B5=C6=92=C6=92=D0=B5=D1=81=C5=A5{=D4=81= =CE=BF=D5=B8=C5=A5=5F=D1=98=CA=8B=D1=95=C5=A5=5F=D1=81=CE=BF=D1=80=D1=83=5F= =D1=80=D0=B0=D1=95=C5=A5=D0=B5=5F=C5=A5=C4=A7=D1=96=D1=95=5F=D1=96=D5=B8= =C5=A5=CE=BF=5F=C5=A5=C4=A7=D0=B5=5F=D0=AC=CE=BF=D1=85}


b3f35f72525ac11300a5f53a209aa2d0.png

After let "Magic" on CyberChef recognized this format, we can see that its "Quoted printable" which can be used to bypass scanners and deliver phishing email to unfortunate users

Do not just copy an output from CyberChef to submit directly, we need to write it down again in plain english (UTF-8)

leveleffect{dont_just_copy_paste_this_into_the_box}

fc79cf6b874779787f382d5259f02b2c.png