🐮 Cowsay

Embarking on his first journey, Fluffy stumbled upon a small farm in a rural area.

There, he met a cow with a scroll tied to its horns. A sign nearby stated:

“Write your message, and the Cow shall say it aloud!”

Fluffy watched as his words echoed back in whimsical, moo-shaped speech bubbles.

A mischievous idea crossed his mind.

“If the Cow can repeat anything given to it, then perhaps I can make it say more than it should,” Fluffy whispered, his tail flicking with excitement.

🪤 Sticky Tar Pit

“Just upload your files—we’ll take care of the rest!”

Welcome to FluffDrive™, your cozy little cloud storage friend. ☁️💼 Designed to make your life easier, we do all the heavy lifting for you! Our server automatically extracts archives upon upload, so you can view your files right away—no more fussing with command lines or decompressing tools.

Whether it’s:

• .zip
• .tar
• .tgz / .tar.gz
• .tbz2 / .tar.bz2

…we’ll unwrap it for you, instantly and automatically. 📂✨

But lately, a few users have noticed something strange: Some files seem to disappear after upload. Or rather… they end up in very unexpected places.

One user reported:

“I uploaded my archive, but I don’t remember including a file called flag. Is it weird that I’m seeing strange files in my drive?”

Our engineers insist everything is working exactly as designed. But hey—maybe there’s something clever happening behind the scenes?

💦 Leaky Tar Pit

“They thought dropping privileges would staunch the flow… but something is seeping through the cracks.” - Fluffy 🦊

After the tar pit fiasco, the engineers discovered the root cause: the extraction service was running with elevated rights.

In a hurry, they dropped all extra privileges.

“No root, no problem” — The Engineers

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to leak the flag without elevated permissions. 🕵️

As always, should you or any of your hackers be caught or reverse shell’d, Fluffy will disavow any knowledge of your actions.

Good luck, hacker

💧 Slippery Tar Pit

“They patched the pit… but something still slithers in the shadows.” - Fluffy 🦊

After two mysterious incidents back at the tar pit, the engineers proudly claimed that they had stamped out the tar bugs; archives now unpack cleanly, and no files vanish…, or so they claim.

Yet Fluffy’s ears picked up a curious whisper in the server logs:

• A mysterious vulnerability lurking where none should exist.
• A core binary behaving just a bit… differently

Fluffy’s instincts tell him this isn’t random. There’s a subtle flaw waiting to be uncovered by the right archive.

“Follow the tails… but beware the slip you never see coming.”

Will you uncover the secret path that still eludes every patch?

🎬 The Everlasting Tail Tale

After breaking through Roen’s dam security and decoding the scattered foxfire fragments from space, Fluffy discovered that both signals were pointing to the same source: an old storytelling server broadcasting from deep within the dam’s restricted network.

The space fragments had been emergency broadcasts from the dam’s backup systems, trying to communicate with the outside world. Following the decoded coordinates, Fluffy found himself at the legendary Tail Tale Theater, still running in the dam’s abandoned entertainment wing.

“The Complete Chronicles of Furry Folk — Every Tale Ever Told”
“Watch all 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 tail tales to unlock the Ancient Wisdom of the Elders and gain access to the emergency override systems.”

The screen flickered with an impossible number. A subtitle appeared below:

“The final tale contains the deepest secret, buried in the very roots of the great digital tree where all stories begin.”

The space signals he’d been chasing were the dam’s distress calls, encoded and scattered by a failing transmission system. But the Tail Tale Theater held the keys to the dam’s deepest secrets - if only one could endure watching every story that could be numbered to reach the root of all tales.

Perhaps there was a way to dig straight to the roots without climbing through every branch of the tale tree.

Author’s note: Despite being a lecture challenge, you can still use ssh, vscode, or desktop. Your target for this challenge is the lecture server located at /challenge/wsgi.py (or /opt/lecture/wsgi.py), with its .config can be found in the same folder.