|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
Welcome back, hackers. Fall semester 2026 is starting off hard and hot — here’s a short update on what ECHO has been up to while you were enjoying your summer.
— ECHO Club |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
One string, no tooling required if you know the trick. Decode it.
Clue: a digital chef is planning to cook for 32 people, twice in one day — how many meals should the base count account for? Whatever number the chef writes down is the encoding you need. Decoded it? Don’t bring it to a meeting — enter the flag into your membership dashboard. Sign in, open the CTF tab, and drop the decoded word into Challenge of the month. The console checks it, records your solve, and lights a square on your wall. One recorded solve per member per month; a wrong guess costs nothing. |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
Summer scoreboard
BrunnerCTF certificate 
the organisers’ certificate of participation. > view the certificateroster · BrunnerCTF: squad of 5 · SkillBit: 6 entered · H7CTF: open, 2 registered (sample — live count pending) SkillBit was the summer’s monthly Flash CTF — five-plus challenges, beginners to veterans, two hours on the clock. ECHO took 12th. BrunnerCTF was the big one — here are three solves worth writing down, each a trust boundary that only held in one of the two places it needed to: [auth] Dumb-factor Auth · a username-less 2FA checked one code against every employee, no rate limit. ⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿
[web] Welcome Aboard · a CL.TE request-smuggling desync, proven with a 408-vs-200 timing oracle. ⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿
[ai] Checkmate · steering an LLM chess bot into Fool’s Mate — it refused in prose while complying on the board. > read the exploit |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
Three Solves from BrunnerCTF 2026 Username-less 2FA takeover, CL.TE smuggling, and an LLM talked into Fool’s Mate. ~10 min. > read the write-up |
||||||||||||||
|
Browser Cookie Value Manipulation When a client-side cookie value becomes the attack surface — and the signed server-side fix. > read the write-up |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
Campus Food Access Survey — 4 minutes, anonymous Run by SGA. We’re collecting real student experience with food on campus — the Peak Cafe and the summer semester. Results go to the college and get posted publicly, whatever they show. No name, no student ID, no email required.
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
| ⣿⣶⣤⠀ | ||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
Member Console v2 is live The members area got a rebuild: tabbed sections, your CTF & certs achievements tracked automatically, and a Perks tab. Sign in with your club email — the code is the whole login. 
> open console
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
Tavily research credits for members Provided by our sponsors and partners so students can build in AI infrastructure and agent-tool development: 4,000 free research-API credits every month to develop AI tools. Learn the ropes with the guided builds at echoclub.org/projects. Claim your code from the Perks tab — and if you need a fresh API key, reach out to an ECHO officer. > browse the project guides > claim perk code |
||||||||||||||
|
H7CTF quals are open and ECHO’s squad is forming — 2 registered so far. Apply through the members console — a quick handle + a note on what you want to work. > join the H7CTF squad |
||||||||||||||
| > read the BrunnerCTF write-up | ||||||||||||||
|
ECHO · Ethical Cybersecurity Hackers Ops Digital caffeine before the digital things. legacy@echoclub.org · echoclub.org · LinkedIn — end of transmission — Published to the ECHO newsletter archive — read every issue. Members get the live edition first, in their inbox. |
