Writeups/MetaCTF/Cooked Books
MetaCTFMediumCTF Challenge

Cooked Books

Cooked Books

##Challenge Name: Cooked Books

###Solves

  • >Solves: 315
  • >Points: 100

###Description

We signed up for a new digital library provider, but the numbers they're giving us for the amount of times that our banned book selection is getting borrowed doesn't seem right. We believe they're hiding some sort of message in the report.

Download the report here.


###Approach

The challenge description hinted that something was odd about the 'Times Borrowed' column of the CSV. I quickly extracted the numbers from that column:

77,101,116,97,67,84,70,123,49,110,102,48,114,109,52,116,105,48,110,95,49,115,95,112,48,119,51,114,125

These numbers appeared to be Decimal ASCII values, so I converted them to ASCII. The result gave us the flag:

MetaCTF{1nf0rm4ti0n_1s_p0w3r}

###Flag

MetaCTF{1nf0rm4ti0n_1s_p0w3r}

$ echo "Open to collaborations, research, and security engineering work."

> Open to collaborations, research, and security engineering work.

$ uptime

> Portfolio online since 2024 | Last updated: Feb 2026

"No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another." — Charles Dickens

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