Story

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Your plan to defeat REGULUS’s surveillance with cryptography is a huge success. With a secure line of communication established, EvanBot and CodaBot are able to send the top-secret plans to your Martian allies. As the Jupiter orbiter slingshots around Mars, your Martian allies execute the top-secret plan, planting bugs throughout the orbiter so that you can listen in on CSA conversations.

One year later, as the orbiter nears its final destination, there’s just one last thing for you to do – find the top-secret deactivation code to shut down the orbiter and defeat the CSA once and for all.

Although the orbiter was launched with cybersecurity best practices of the time, it spent the last year in the asteroid belt, where Internet connection is spotty and it was impossible to download any of the latest security patches. As a result, the Jupiter orbiter remains vulnerable to some of the latest CVEs.

Armed with the latest CVEs, EvanBot starts melting down the orbiter’s defenses like butter on a hot stack of pancakes. There’s just one problem…the Jupiter orbiter’s onboard computers also run an unfathomably complex and backwards HR system. EvanBot and CodaBot’s combined intelligence is no match against CSA’s archaic… PTO request system? Do bots even need PTO?

This is where you come in. Luckily for you, the CSA outsourced the file management of its HR system to an up-and-coming startup that doesn’t even pretend to be SOC2 compliant. It appears that CSA takes the company’s recently acquired unicorn status as a guarantee they will deliver on security and compliance “eventually”.

With the help of the wiretapped conversations supplied from your Martian friends, you must finish the job that your comrades started. Your job is to hack into the CSA’s HR filesystem to find the top-secret deactivation code.

Time is of the essence. The deactivation code needs to be found and delivered to REGULUS by Friday, April 18, 2025, or the Jupiter orbiter will be in position to unleash its nefarious intent! The fate of the interplanetary world depends on your ability to navigate through the CSA’s final boss.