Writeup to the FLARE-ON 5 challenge

NOTE: this is an edited repost of an article written back in 2018; you can read the original here.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. dem contests
3. Epilogue
4. Acknowledgements

Introduction

On the 15th of August 2018, FireEye launched their fifth annual FLARE-ON competition, in where contestants are given six weeks to work out the flags to a number of reverse engineering problems. Sadly, I was only able to work out three flags out of the total twelve reverse engineering problems. My reasons *cough* excuses *wheeze* as to why this is are as follows:

1. I’m a n00b at reversing. This is unacceptable, I gotta stop killing brain cells with silly stuff on the internet, and start going through the FLARE-ON archives and reading up on RCE literature (more on that later).
2. I just found out about the contest on the 22nd of September, which was like five weeks after the thing got started.
3. At the moment, I’m looking for a job. A lot of my time is spent studying for certifications and doing volunteer work that’ll (hopefully) land me a position in helldesk (which is still better than nothing).