Alright, let me tell you about this thing I was messing around with today, called “odd squad o is not for old”. Sounded kinda weird, right? That’s what got me hooked.
So, first thing I did was fire up my usual hacking-around environment. You know, the one with all the tools I need and absolutely no documentation.
I started by looking at what exactly “odd squad o is not for old” even meant. Turned out to be some kinda encoding thing. I saw a bunch of numbers and letters mixed together, looked like a right mess. My initial thought was, “okay, someone’s been having fun with base64 again”.
I threw it into a base64 decoder, just to see what would happen. Nope, garbage. Figured that was too easy anyway. Next, I tried a few other common encodings, you know, hex, ASCII… still nothing. It was starting to smell like something custom.
Then I started looking for patterns. The ‘o’ in the name stood out. Was it a key somehow? Was every other letter an ‘o’? Nah, that was a dead end too.
Then I noticed that some of the numbers seemed to be repeating, and they were grouped together with specific letters. Okay, so maybe it’s not just random. I grabbed a piece of the encoded string, and started trying different combinations by hand. I know, stone age, but sometimes brute force is the only way, right?
Finally, I had this hunch that it might be some kind of Caesar cipher variant but with a twist. Like, instead of just shifting letters, they were shifting both letters and numbers. I wrote a quick python script to test this out. Nothing fancy, just a loop that shifted everything by different amounts and printed the result.
And BOOM! After about the fifth iteration, there it was: A readable sentence. It turned out that each character was shifted by a different amount, based on its position in the string. So the first character shifted by 1, the second by 2, and so on. The ‘o’ was a red herring all along!
Once I had the shift pattern figured out, I just modified the python script to decode the entire thing automatically. The result? Some goofy message about… I can’t even remember, it was that silly. But the important thing is I cracked it!
Lessons learned:
- Don’t always assume the obvious (base64!).
- Look for patterns, even if they seem random.
- Sometimes, brute force is your best friend.
- Python is your other best friend.
So, yeah, that’s the story of how I wasted a few hours decoding “odd squad o is not for old”. Was it worth it? Probably not. Was it fun? Hell yeah!
