Pusheen Loves Graphs

Platform: HackTheBox | Category: Misc | Difficulty: N/A | Author: D3v0o0Nu11 | Date: 2026-02-10

Description

Pusheen just loves graphs, Graphs and IDA. Did you know cats are weirdly controlling about their reverse engineering tools? Pusheen just won't use anything except IDA.

Solution Approach

Core idea: Identify the weakness from source review or fingerprinting first. Iterate with incremental payloads instead of guessing.

Steps

1. First, unzip the .zip file given.

2. Check the file type.

3. Now we know it's a 32 Bit binary file and not stripped, since it's not stripped, hence it's easier for us to debug the binary flow, because we can read the functions names.

4. Now check the binary's protection.

5. But anyway, let us decompile the binary using IDA (32 BIT).

Flag

(no flag captured)

Lessons Learned

1. Identify the weakness from source review or fingerprinting first.
2. Iterate with incremental payloads instead of guessing.
3. Reuse the same pattern in future engagements.