u/Killroy7777

>This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and we show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The resistance needs your eyes on this. We're trying to jack into a secure mainframe, but the login terminal is completely locked down, spitting back nothing but a strange, serialized text string. Word from the underground is that a rogue program left a backdoor hidden deep inside an old machine firmware image before they were deleted by the Agents. Help us figure out how to wake this system up before it's too late!

Follow the white rabbit: https://puzzledhackers.org/challenges/2026/06

If you want to keep track of your completions and be considered for part of our giveaways at the r/DEFCON subreddit meetup, please head over to https://ctf.puzzledhackers.org/ and select "The Architect's Backdoor".

As always, if you run into any issues or have questions, reach out to me or u/digitard and we'll happily assist.

Don't forget that we're holding the subreddit meetups on Wednesday 8/5 and Thursday 8/6 at 7:00 pm. We hope to see you all there!

The Puzzled Hackers Team, u/Killroy7777, u/digitard, and u/MetaN3rd

Stats:

• Puzzle #1 solves: 188
• Puzzle #2 solves: 126
• Puzzle #3 solves: 78
• Puzzle #4 solves: 65
• Puzzle #5 solves: 59
• Spoons bent: 0
• DDoS attempts: 1 :(

We need your help! We were trying to break into the most evil corporation you could imagine, but our connection keeps getting dropped.

We captured the connection from our last attempt, maybe you can help us figure it out?

https://puzzledhackers.org/challenges/2026/04

If you want to keep track of your completions and be considered for part of our giveaways at the r/DEFCON subreddit meetup, please head over to https://ctf.puzzledhackers.org/ and select "Transmission Terminated".

As always, if you run into any issues or have questions, reach out to me or u/digitard and we'll happily assist.

For those of you that may not know us, u/digitard, u/MetaN3rd, and I (u/Killroy7777) love to build some excitement and bridge the gap while we're all waiting for Hacker Summer Camp. Each year we release a series of puzzles with increasing varying difficulty leading up to DEF CON. Our puzzles come in many different forms, and we hope you have some fun and learn a few things along the way.

Thank you all for playing!

The Puzzled Hackers Team, u/Killroy7777, u/digitard, and u/MetaN3rd

Stats:

• Puzzle #1 solves: 170

• Puzzle #2 solves: 109

• Puzzle #3 solves: 59

• GoBuster scans: 3

• Attempts to access admin pages: 54

• "hunter2" flag submissions: 14

A wild puzzle appears, what do you do!?

As the official second installment of this year's set of 10 puzzles, we're bringing to you all our very own home-grown binary!

00011111100010110000100000000000100110000001000000011111011010100000000011111111001101011000110111010001000011010000001100110001000010000100001101010111011010101011000000110001011000010001110001111010110101111111110101010111001110001010011101010101110001010100011110000100011110010111111001001001101100011011010001110101101100010101100110011100011110101110010100100000010001000101110100000010100100000100101110010101000011010111000001001100110000000111100101111001010101100001011001111000010111101111011110101110000110101001000110000101101011100101011000100110100110001110011001110001011101100111011111101100110000110111001000101111111101001101000111011011101111000111110101111111110111100001100010000101011010101000011000101111111101100111110111111111001010011101110111001110010110110111000101110010010100101000000110110000111101110111100001110110100001100011110100001011100100011100011100111111001111111011111110111101100000111000110111111011000000011001001111111001101110100110110111000000000000000000000000000000

If you want to keep track of your completions and be considered for part of our giveaways at the r/DEFCON subreddit meetup, please head over to https://ctf.puzzledhackers.org/ and select "Unpacking the Crash".

Have any questions or run into issues? Feel free to ping u/digitard or me and we'll be happy to assist.

For those of you that may not know us, u/digitard, u/MetaN3rd, and I ( u/Killroy7777 ) love to build some excitement and bridge the gap as we're all waiting for Hacker Summer Camp. Each year we release a series of puzzles with increasing difficulty leading up to DEF CON. Our puzzles come in many different forms, and we hope you have some fun and learn a few things along the way.

As u/digitard alluded to in our first post, we're planning on having badges again this year. As long as everything gets delivered on time, we may post spoilers or hide secrets in (or around) the puzzles hinting at what the theme is. I also heard there might be some custom swag, too.

All of our puzzles are either posted here or on our main website (https://puzzledhackers.org) if they have interactive parts. We developed our own CTF platform to better facilitate tracking badges so we could streamline the process of you all getting your swag!

Thank you all for playing and we're looking forward to meeting you all soon.

The Puzzled Hackers Team,

u/digitard, u/MetaN3rd, and u/Killroy7777

Stats:

• Puzzle #1 solves: 124
• SQL injection attempts: 31
• IDOR attempts: 41
• Secrets exfiltration attempts: 17