Cyber Apocalypse 2025

This was the third time that I participated in a HackTheBox CTF competition, the Cyber Apocalypse 2025 CTF competition. My team, the Frankestein CTF Team, is a group of members from multiple companies, but it’s rooted in Synopsys CTF Team.

I was helping with the pwn challenges, and solved:

• pwn_blessing
• pwn_laconic
• pwn_contractor
• pwn_crossbow
• pwn_quack_quack

I tried to solve pwn_vault after the competition, and go through some ideas shared by a team member (Phil), but wasn’t able to get it working. Then I saw two write-ups that provided some missing pieces of the puzzle. Thanks to those, I was able to complete a solution. You can find links to the write-ups above. For pwn_vault, even though I didn’t solve during the competition, I also plan to do a writeup.

I found pwntools cheatsheet by anvbis very useful to refresh my memory on pwntools, I’m making a reference here in case it’s useful to others.

A big shout out to the team and Phil for the hints. We managed to end in the 86th position of the ranking despite not having all our members from the past :)

Enjoy the reading!