PicoGym Web Exploitation Writeup | where are the robots | Easy | PicoCTF

PicoGym Web Exploitation Writeup | where are the robots | Easy | PicoCTF

Originally posted on my Medium page.

In this challenge, we are tasked with finding the “robots” hidden somewhere on a website.

The title and description hint that the answer may lie in the website’s robots.txt file, a file used to control which parts of a website search engines are allowed to crawl and index. Our goal is to locate this file or any other hidden clues on the site that could lead us to the flag. Let’s explore the website and see if we can uncover where the robots are hiding.

To start, we open the website and try to access the robots.txt file by appending /robots.txt to the URL.

This tells us that the /477ce.html page is disallowed for search engine crawlers, suggesting that it could be an important hidden page. Let’s navigate directly to the URL: https://jupiter.challenges.picoctf.org/problem/36474/477ce.html to check if it contains anything valuable.

Upon visiting the page, we uncover the flag hidden there

The flag is: picoCTF{ca1cu1at1ng_Mach1n3s_477ce}

📖 Want more CTF and OSINT writeups like this? Check out my Medium page here.