Communication Transcript: Node KZ-6857



Message Transport: Directed multi node exchange. Low bandwidth.

Participating Nodes: Node KZ-6857, Mining Factory 37-Node1, Mining Factory 37-ConferenceRoom

Crypto mode: Encrypted-in-transit.

Transcript start:

Mining Factory 37-1: Imani, we are in the middle of docking an asteroid with the factory. If you don’t have any real results a lot of people in the factory will be angry for pausing a very sensitive maneuver.

Node KZ-6857: Cut the drama Mr. Hartjen. Your factory has been in matched orbits with that asteroid for the past Earth Month and your computers don’t have any maneuvering burns in the flight plan. I know you didn’t hire a military level navigator from GS5 to do a manual dock. Infact, I think you were happy not to suffocated in the conference hall of GS5 while your fleet was being cut down by K-Z kinetic missiles. Should we continue with the briefing?

Mining Factory 37-1: Watch your mouth girl! You were hired because you come from a mining family and I thought you could be trusted…

<KZ-6857 METADATA: Mining Factory 37-Node1 connection forcibly terminated>

Node KZ-6857: It seems that Mr. Hartjen is more interested in shows of force than he is in listening. Madam Veronika, I trust you are still in the Factory Conference Room and I can proceed with my report?

Mining Factory 37-ConferenceRoom: Yes Imani - proceed. Malik will join us in the conference room to offset the unfortunate - and I trust temporary - failure of his cabin node.

Node KZ-6857: Excellent. The Wreckage Guild reached out to me via my family to help you with the hack of the rUn crypto wallets and find the culprits. I stumbled on several unexpected challenges so this effort took me longer than expected. Please bear with me, it becomes quite interesting.

First things first - I found the missing rUn credits - ALL OF THEM. The funds are placed in a corporate crypto wallet of a newly incorporated company called Somu Unlimited. The company has no history and the registering entity metadata is empty. The shareholders consist of every single mining crew out there, in percentage appropriate to the stolen funds from their crypto wallets. The names listed on the management board are the Mining Guild Chiefs and all the bosses of the free agents. Somu Unlimited has already requested advanced precision manufacturing equipment from the GS blueprint libraries, logged a plan for the creation of a planetoid based factory and has even started offering a product line of advanced communication equipment on the trading boards. If it wasn’t for the hack itself, all these moves would have been the best collaborative effort of the miners in the entire history of My Way system. The articles of incorporation contain a statement that the funds were pooled by the Miners to unite in a common company for improving profit margins.

I am uploading the articles of incorporation of Somu to all Guilds and independent crews as we speak.

Now for the more complicated part of the briefing: There is no trace of whoever did all this - the hack, the incorporation, the business model. No data library, log repository nor satellite logs of K-Z, Riordan, GS ships or anyone else has any record of the fund transfers nor traffic activity that correlates to the hack nor the incorporation. It’s impossible to scrub all the data records so perfectly - even if it was, the absence of data would also be a trace to follow. The hack originated in the Debris Cloud mining ships, and it stopped there. I can’t pinpoint the exact ship of origin. The logs of all mining ships record fragments of the hack activity at nearly the same times, with delays too short to explain skipping across ship computers via data links. I can only assume that a much more skilled hacker has created a distributed program that executed in sync using the mining ships computers as a botnet. Once the program completed it deleted itself.

For any external forensic auditors from the GS ships, K-Z or anyone else it would look like the miners have started a collaborative company by using a bit of strong-arming. We don’t know who the benefactor is - we may never know.

I have one last piece of news for you Madam Veronika - The articles of incorporation contain a heavily encrypted message addressed to the Guild Chiefs. The metadata of the message states that the decryption key is deposited with the Matriarchs with a password “yourselectionsarecorrect”. From what I gather, the key is stored somewhere on each of the Matriarch’s PDA. You need to search your PDA for the key and use it to decrypt the message.

Transcript end.

Challenge: The link below contains the image of the Matriarch PDA filesystem. You need to find the file key and use it to decrypt the message. First solution gets a $15 US Amazon gift card and bragging rights. Everyone else gets just the bragging rights.

URL to file: https://bit.ly/2D6F9Ww

Send the solution via the contact link

https://cliffnest.shortinfosec.net/contact

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