Unbelievable

Challenge Statement

Author: @JohnHammond

Don’t believe everything you see on the Internet!

Anyway, have you heard this intro soundtrack from Half-Life 3?

Attachment: Half-Life_3_OST.mp3

Solution

Downloading the file, it seems to be an MP3 audio. So I played it with aplay from ALSA driver. It actually played but it was just random noise for a couple seconds.

Since the challenge description tells about misinformation I decided to check if it is really a audio file. So I checked it with the file utility.

So it appears this is not an audio at all. I have no idea how aplay played it. So anyway treating it as a image file and I opened it and the flag was in the image.

One might use OCR techniques to read the flag or just type from it manually.

Bonus point: If you use something like the ranger file browser, it just shows you the flag directly. No fuss.