Arg1033

Curiosity is the key to excellence. A curious person learns what interests him. If for some reason he remains unsatisfied, curiosity forces him to seek answers in other places and in other ways.

ARG or Alternate reality game - interactive storytelling in the network using game elements that uses the real world as a platform. These are such giant multiplayer puzzles combining role-playing and computer games, journalistic investigations, science fiction and mysticism. The influence of the audience on the outcome of ARG is so great that the plot can go according to an unforeseen scenario, end ahead of time or stop in the middle. Today, millions of people around the world play entertainment commercial projects. The main driving forces in solving ARG are: curiosity, solving puzzles, studying cryptography and checking your erudition, because if you could reach the final, you can rightly consider yourself one of the few lucky ones. There are many examples of ARG: Cicada3301 [url] https: // en.

Entire ARGs have formed around the ARG solution, their ranks are constantly growing, and some researchers even organize the so-called CTF-like quests, which at times are just as good as full ARG. Roughly speaking, this is a mixture of ARG and CTF, but different from the first (ARG) by the absence of hidden marketing, and from the second (CTF) by the optional presence of a player’s team, the quest itself has a win, a point counter and the date of the event, and the puppeteer (Puppet Master / PM) the desire to encourage particularly distinguished enthusiasts. However, the lack of pre-assembled teams does not mean the absence of a team solution to the tasks. Therefore, most often, interested players come together in open * nonprofit * communities and help each other with solutions to ambiguous or questionable puzzles.

For example, a whole subreddit on various network puzzles (r / HiddenService) in which everyone can share a link to a quest unknown to the community, contribute to solving existing active tasks or gain experience from already solved ARGs. The overwhelming majority of those interested in this topic live on Reddit and almost always are the first to find inconspicuous pages on DarkNet. Of great importance for network researchers, CTF-like quests are played due to the awakening of the so-called Puppets of an unquenchable desire to satisfy their own curiosity, which is intensified with each solved task.

The Russian community of Internet researchers (nettalks) has repeatedly come across very original CTF-like quests, the mention of which was not noticed on Reddit. Most often, thematic resources are searched on the so-called deep or dark Internet. Sometimes this happens by accident, occasionally - deliberately, because in Darknet there is no usual indexing of sites for us, and to search for the necessary material, you need to sort through more than a dozen search engines. Enthusiasts from the community manually sort through the tens of thousands of links located on Darknet’s free hosting services, hoping to see at least one of them reminiscent of ARG. And as soon as this happens, the community comes together to solve the found piece of a great online game. I say "found piece" because

With the passage of time and the emergence of an increasing number of CTF-like resources in the community library, a library of knowledge or utilities is also accumulating to help (help?) In solving more than one ARG. But it’s not so much the must-have utilities that help in completing the quest from beginning to end, but the ability to think in a peculiar way, correctly understand the prompts and find a solution where no one pays attention. Basically, such difficulties in ARG are caused by the non-triviality of the task. But for any non-trivial riddle there is an even more non-trivial solution. Perhaps you are the most curious and erudite of all!

The time has come to introduce you to some CTF-like quests that have most interested our community in their complexity, originality and beauty of execution. Having examined the full cycle from searching to obtaining the coveted flag, we will also try to find out which of the well-known utilities will be useful for beginner ARG-receivers and what do they have in common with players in CTF?

sophielkpqe34cl6.onion is a resource that no internet user will pass without interest. (photo first page.png)

A hex code flaunts on the main page, below it is a picture from Yin-Yang and a binary code at the very bottom, and a strange melody called whiterabbit plays in the background. The first thing that should come to the mind of a researcher of such resources is to immediately look at the html-code of the page, not paying attention to what would seem to be obvious to the eyes. Usually it’s in the page code that hides either hints or meaningless comments by developers, and sometimes links to the next level themselves.

In our case, the developer’s console hides a link to the creator’s profile on the site blackhatworld [url] www.blackhatworld.com/forums/sophie.36594 [/ url] (photo developer’s console.PNG) and a small tip:
00AB Does only webpages have meta data? >>.

I also advise you to pay attention to one [url] https://www.argn.com/ [/ url] of the largest English-language resources covering events in the world of ARG.