Ghost Track - Lvl 8: Lost in Translation

This level introduces "multi-layer" encoding. The secret isn't just Base64; it's wrapped in another format first.

You'll find a file called transmission.dat. If you cat it, you'll see a hex dump (columns of numbers and letters like 5244 4e6a).

To solve this, you have to "peel the onion": 1. Hex to Binary: Use xxd -r to convert the hex text back into actual binary data. 2. Binary to Text: The resulting data is still Base64 encoded, so pipe it into base64 -d.

The one-liner looks like this:

cat transmission.dat | xxd -r | base64 -d

Result: REDACTED

TL;DR: If a file looks like a hex dump, use xxd -r to reverse it. If the result is still gibberish, try base64 -d. Always keep piping until the data becomes human-readable.