Crypto

Here's an encoding challenge. This doesnt really test your technical skills, but focuses on your critical thinking.

Image: neverlan2020_secretmessage.jpg

Recon

The image contains several drawings of 5x5 squares where one square was filled. And one drawing without a square filled. This gives 26 possibilities of drawings, so we could map this to a letter from the alphabet.

We started with 'a' as the first filled square, and then from left to right, top to bottom the remaining letters, with 'z' being the empty drawing. This gave us mhbdinaxntgzbjdq which is rotated once to get the flag nicejobyouhacker. So 'a' was the empty drawing and the first filled square would start at 'b'.

Flag

nicejobyouhacker