where are the robots

27 September 2026

Summary

Can you find the robots?

Analysis

Since this challenge is in the "web exploitation" category and its title mentions robots, I believed it was a reference to the robots.txt file and decided to check it out. Note that you can solve this challenge by accessing the web browser or directly in the CLI using a tool like cURL.

What is robots.txt?

This file is an implementation of the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP). This protocol tells web crawlers which directories/files they are allowed to index and robots.txt contains the entries. It also implies that this text file should be parsed first by the crawlers before any other pages is accessed.

What is a web crawler?

A web crawler, also known as "spider", is an automated program tasked with indexing websites and their content. This is how websites show up when using search engines such as Google.

Solution

If we head over to the /robots.txt path, we should find this interesting entry:

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: [REDACTED]
                

By navigating to this path, we will get the flag.

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