RSAC picoCTF Guide

Previous Level Guide: Getting Help

Ancient Wisdom

Name: Ancient Wisdom
Description: The Internet is constantly changing, shedding, regrowing... there are those who remember. Can you resurrect the article at this forgotten URL? http://captf.com/maxims.html The flag is the article's most recent publication date. If it was published on January 6th, 1337 A.D. you would submit `picoCTF{1337-01-06}`
Type: General Skills
Challenge from: RSAC picoCTF 2025
Hints:
1. Have you ever used the Internet Archive?

Theory

According to the description, to get the flag we have to find an article from a website that has been deleted since, and that article's most recent modification. For this we could use something called The Wayback Machine, a tool made by the Internet Archive to preserve a webpage in that exact moment, which is perfect for this, as we can look for the latest archival was for this URL in The Wayback Machine on their website, `web.archive.org` or the top of `archive.org`. It's funny because I use the Internet Archive to upload the images in my challenges, like this one.

Solution

So we'll go to The Wayback Machine's URL search in the pages mentioned in theory and search for that URL:

Now let's go to the last time this was archived, we can see it was 2020 where there's some lines, and if you click there you'll see the last archival was on the 12th of december as I point out with a big red arrow in this image:

If we click on that archival, we can see that the date is right there below the article's title, I even selected it to show you:

And if we add that date I selected to the flag format:

picoCTF{2015-12-17}

There we go! That's the flag.