The Australian Government and Tesltra sponsored the 2014 Cyber Security Challenge Australia competition.  They posted the virtual machine, which hosts most of the challenges, here.  I followed the setup instructions for VirtualBox.  This is another short writeup, that will use some basic Python networking code to solve the challenge

Lab setup:

Challenge:

challenge

To begin, I tested the program to get an idea of what the server at 10.0.0.13:5050 is sending using netcat:

1

I wrote a simply Python client that parses through the input, determines the anagram solution, and sends it back to the server.  By sorting the incoming word and all of the words in the wordlist and comparing, we can find the solution:

code

Full code can be found here: https://github.com/ehrenb/CYSCA2014