Writeup by n0tpresl3y for Dérèglement

intro forensics windows

October 19, 2025

Table of contents

Analysis steps

  1. Extract embedded files / unpack the DOCX
# run binwalk to extract embedded/carved files
binwalk -e /path/to/2021-fcsc-reglement_de_participation.docx

binwalk will create a directory named something like _2021-fcsc-reglement_de_participation.docx.extracted. Inside that directory you should find a word folder containing document.xml.

  1. Locate the document.xml file
# change into the extracted dir (name depends on binwalk's output)
cd _2021-fcsc-reglement_de_participation.docx.extracted/word
ls -lah
# you should see document.xml (or similarly named xml fragments)
  1. Search for the flag string(s)

Because document.xml contains many XML tags and formatting markup, use grep to extract lines containing the token FCSC. Use -a to treat binary files as text and -n to show line numbers.

# simple search showing context
grep -a -n "FCSC" document.xml

# narrow to only the matching strings (Perl-compatible regex)
grep -a -Po "FCSC\{.*?\}" document.xml

Findings

  • By extracting the DOCX with binwalk -e and searching word/document.xml, the flag string was located.
  • Recovered flag: FCSC{9bc5a6d51022ac}