NSA Codebreaker

8 posts tagged “NSA Codebreaker”.

• January 29, 2026

  2025 NSA Codebreaker Challenge Writeup

  Complete writeups for all seven tasks of the 2025 NSA Codebreaker Challenge — covering digital forensics, reverse engineering, malware analysis, cryptanalysis, and vulnerability research.

• Forensics on a Compromised Linux Machine

  2025 NSA Codebreaker Challenge Task 1 (Forensics): analyzing an EXT2 filesystem image to uncover suspicious artifacts on a compromised development machine.

• Hunting Malware in a PCAP with Wireshark

  2025 NSA Codebreaker Challenge Task 2 (Network Forensics): dissecting a PCAP in Wireshark to trace malicious DNS and FTP traffic from an infected endpoint.

• Reverse Engineering a Router Memory Dump

  2025 NSA Codebreaker Challenge Task 3 (Reverse Engineering): using Volatility on a Linux router memory dump and reversing its kernel to find the compromise.

• Unpacking Obfuscated Malware in IDA

  2025 NSA Codebreaker Challenge Task 4 (Malware Analysis): reversing an obfuscated binary in IDA, defeating ptrace anti-debugging, and recovering its AES/RSA configuration.

• Cryptanalysis of the Malware's C2

  2025 NSA Codebreaker Challenge Task 5 (Cryptanalysis): breaking the malware's cryptography to identify who was controlling its command-and-control channel.

• Exploiting a Mattermost Server

  2025 NSA Codebreaker Challenge Task 6 (Vulnerability Research): exploiting a Mattermost instance to break into the adversary's private communications channel.

• Exploiting an Android App

  2025 NSA Codebreaker Challenge Task 7 (Exploitation): exploiting a custom Android message-archiver APK to compromise the adversary's Google Pixel device.