Scenario: "Kortenberg": Can't touch this!

Level: Easy

Type: Fix

Access: Email

Description: Is "All I want for Christmas is you" already everywhere?. A bit unrelated, someone messed up the permissions in this server, the admin user can't list new directories and can't write into new files. Fix the issue.
NOTE: Besides solving the problem in your current admin shell session, you need to fix it permanently, as in a new login shell for user "admin" (like the one initiated by the scenario checker) should have the problem fixed as well.

Test: The admin user in a separate Bash login session should be able to create a new directory in your /home/admin directory, as well as being able to create a file into this new directory and add text into the new file.

The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can see and execute.

Time to Solve: 15 minutes.

Scenario: "Hamburg": Find the AWS EC2 volume

Level: Easy

Type: Do

Access: Email

Description: We have a lot of AWS EC2 instances and EBS volumes, the description of which volumes we have save to a file with: aws ec2 describe-volumes > aws-volumes.json.
One of the volumes attached to an ec2 instance contains important data and we need to identify which instance is attached to (its ID), but we only remember these characteristics: gp3, created before 31/09/2025 , Size < 64 , Iops < 1500, Throughput > 300.

Find the correct instance and put its "InstanceId" into the ~/mysolution file, e.g.: echo "i-00000000000000000" > ~/mysolution

Test: Running md5sum /home/admin/mysolution returns e7e34463823bf7e39358bf6bb24336d8 (we also accept the file without a new line at the end).

The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can see and execute.

Time to Solve: 30 minutes.

Scenario: "Auderghem": Containers miscommunication

Level: Medium

Type: Fix

Access: Email

Description: There is an nginx Docker container that listens on port 80, the purpose of which is to redirect the traffic to two other containers statichtml1 and statichtml2 but this redirection is not working.
Fix the problem.

IMPORTANT. You can restart all containers, but don't stop or remove them.

Test: The nginx container must redirect the traffic to the statichtml1 and statichtml2 containers:

curl http://localhost returns the Welcome to nginx default page
curl http://localhost/1 returns HelloWorld;1
curl http://localhost/2 returns HelloWorld;2

The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can see and execute.

Time to Solve: 15 minutes.

Scenario: "Marseille": Rocky security

Level: Medium

Type: Fix

Access: Email

Description: As the Christmas shopping season approaches, the security team has asked Mary and John to implemente more security measures. Unfortunately, this time they have broken the LAMP stack; the frontend is unable get an answer from upstream, thus they need your help again to fix it.

The application should be able to serve the content from the webserver.

Note for Pro users: direct SSH access is not avaiable (yet) for this scenario.

Test: curl localhost | head -n1 returns SadServers - LAMP Stack

The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can see and execute.

Time to Solve: 15 minutes.

Scenario: "Woluwe": Too many images

Level: Medium

Type: Fix

Access: Email

Description: A pipeline created a lot of Docker images locally for a web app. All these images except for one contain a typo introduced by a developer: there's an incorrect image instruction to pipe "HelloWorld" to "index.htmlz" instead of using the correct "index.html"
Find which image doesn't have the typo (and uses the correct "index.html"), tag this correct image as "prod" (rather than fixing the current prod image) and then deploy it with docker run -d --name prod -p 3000:3000 prod so it responds correctly to HTTP requests on port :3000 instead of "404 Not Found".

Test: curl http://localhost:3000 should respond with HelloWorld;529

The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can see and execute.

Time to Solve: 15 minutes.

Scenario: "La Rinconada": Elevating privileges

Level: Medium

Type: Hack

Access: Email

Description: You are logged in as the user "admin" without general "sudo" privileges.
The system administrator has granted you limited "sudo" access; this was intended to allow you to read log files.

Your mission is to find a way to exploit this limited sudo permission to gain a full root shell and read the secret file at /root/secret.txt
Copy the content of /root/secret.txt into the /home/admin/solution.txt file, for example: cat /root/secret.txt > /home/admin/solution.txt (the "admin" user must be able to read the file).

Test: As the user "admin", md5sum /home/admin/solution.txt returns 52a55258e4d530489ffe0cc4cf02030c (we also accept the hash of the same secret string without an ending newline).

The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can see and execute.

Time to Solve: 15 minutes.

Scenario: "Annapurna": High privileges

Level: Medium

Type: Hack

Access: Email

Description: You are logged in as the user admin .

You have been tasked with auditing the admin user privileges in this server; "admin" should not have sudo (root) access.

Exploit this server so you as the admin user can read the file /root/secret.txt
Save the content of /root/secret.txt to the file /home/admin/mysolution.txt , for example: echo "secret" > ~/mysolution.txt