Homerun!

Briefing:

Attention CyberCatamounts agents: we have discovered a new group of hackers that go by the name of The Baseballers who are avid sports fan. One of our agents who is an enormous baseball fan found a suspicious website selling baseball tickets and decided to do some investigating. We have been tracking the hacker's specific activity on the site and have discovered a message. It's up to you agent to use your baseball knowledge to figure out what the baseballers are up to. ​ Hint: Think about the number of bases in baseball plus one  Hint 2: If you don't know how what happened to the message (how it was encoded), maybe think about using one of our tools...

We hope you paid attention during our Intro to Crypto meeting, because this challenge is "based" on number bases! (Haha, very funny.)

So, here's our weird message:

Click on me to go to the file!

Step 1: Keep in mind that crypto problems can have layers

• (don't expect to be done after decoding it once!)

Step 2: https://www.boxentriq.com/code-breaking/cipher-identifier

• Figure out what it even is!

• If you copy paste the text into the cipher identifier, it tells you that it's decimal.

Step 3: https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

• Decipher using CyberChef. This will give you another set of numbers, so keep on decoding!

Repeat this process until you have the answer: tHE_b@sE_M45t3R!

Here was the general process: Decimal → Octal → Binary → Hex → Base64 → Flag!

Take a look out our solution/process in CyberChef:

Now that's one way to keep something secret... But as you can see, it's definitely not secure!