CTF-Writeups

Mārtiņa-CTF – Meme Challenge Write-up

Category: Misc / Fun
Team: Dikti cool ctf komanda

Challenge Description

The greatest quality of any self-respecting hacker is their sense of humour.
Create a meme related to Mārtiņa-CTF, send it to Mārtiņš #71 or Mārtiņš #404 on Discord (along with your team name) and wait while the Cringe Council makes a decision.

The Cringe Council working hours are from 08:00 to 22:00 (EET / UTC+2).

Goal: create a Mārtiņa-CTF-related meme, submit it correctly, and receive the flag from the Cringe Council.

Background – martins.soup

Earlier in the CTF there was a challenge involving a file called martins.soup.
Inside it was a corrupted PNG, and our team never managed to recover the flag.

As a running joke we started repeating a popular Latvian meme phrase:

“huļi bļoda netīra”
(roughly: “why is the bowl dirty?”)

This became the core inspiration for our meme.

Our Meme

We created a two-panel “expectation vs reality” meme based on the soup challenge.

Concept

  1. Top panel – Expectations

    • Image: a nice, clean bowl of soup.
    • Caption:
      what we expected from martins.soup

  2. Bottom panel – Reality

    • Image: a heavily glitched / corrupted-looking image, representing the broken PNG.
    • Overlaid text:
      • * detected: corrupted PNG
      • * flag not found
      • * huļi bloda netira
    • Bottom line:
      Team Dikti cool ctf komanda

The joke is that we expected a normal “soup” / easy file, and instead got a cursed PNG, no flag, and only our catchphrase: huļi bļoda netīra.

Submission Process

  1. Created the meme as a PNG image.
  2. During Cringe Council active hours (08:00–22:00 EET) we sent the meme on Discord to:
    • Mārtiņš #71 or Mārtiņš #404
  3. Included our team name in the message:
    • Dikti cool ctf komanda

After review, the Cringe Council accepted the meme and replied with the flag.