Stripe CTF Post Mortem: A Would-Be Hacker's Tale

Why on earth would a "talented hacker" do anything other than the easiest effective method? If it doesn't work, then just try something else. They certainly wouldn't waste their time trying to hide code snippets in a GIF when you could just upload the above.

In short: the "talented hacker" is the one who compromises your system. The difficulty of execution does not matter if you get owned in the end.

> That doesn't look like the work of a very talented hacker.

Why not? Do all talented hackers use 'readfile()'?

In one of the rounds the attack was exactly that, payload inside a gif

The astute reader will also note that Five and Six were also not discussed. From the fourth paragraph, "I will be discussing a subset of the nine challenges".

Also skips 5 & 6. In a closing paragraph the author mentions the discussed levels were "some of my favourite levels".

Perhaps that's the "would-be" part. The portion of people who solved it dropped off fairly heavily for the last level.