Level 12: Wrapped Three Deep

This one is a total guessing game. You're handed data.wrapped, and the prompt tells you it's nested three layers deep in different compression formats.

The first instinct is to look at the extension, but .wrapped tells us nothing. That's where the file command comes in—it's the only way to know what you're actually dealing with without guessing.

file data.wrapped reveals it's a POSIX tar archive. I unpacked it with tar -xvf, and that dropped a file called core.txt.gz.bz2.

Now we're looking at a double extension. I recognized .bz2 as the outer shell, so I stripped it with bunzip2. That left me with core.txt.gz. One last layer—a quick gunzip—and I finally hit the bottom.

cat core.txt and the flag is right there.

Result: REDACTED

TL;DR: Never trust extensions. Use file to identify the layer, unpack, and repeat until you hit raw text.