HackIM Misc. 300

Given an MP3 we are asked to find a key. Normally I just assume that the challenge with MP3 either has multiple tracks or that something that has hidden text.

So I took the track and drop it in Audacity:

We notice immediately that there's a second track...

So we change to spectrogram:

Scroll in...

And we have Morse code. We know that it's morse code given that the longer lines are 3x that of the shorter. So that seems pretty easy for a challenge.. What did we miss? We translate the morse code from left to right and end up with garbage.

We sit around for a little while and figure we just missed something. Maybe it's binary somehow, maybe it's some other representation. After about 15 minutes, someone notices that the actual sound-track (track 1) sounds like it could be backwards. So we read the code from right to left and we get..

.. .-.. --- ...- . --. --- .- -.-.-- -. ..- .-.. .-.. -.-. --- -. ..--- ----- .---- ....- .. ... .- .-- . ...  --- -- . -.-.-- -.-.--

Translated..

We get: ILOVEGOA?NULLCON2014ISAWESOME??

Assuming "?" are "!", we submit the key and finish the challenge.

Key: ILOVEGOA!NULLCON2014ISAWESOME!!