One of my favorite commands to use on binary challenges during a capture the flag competition is the strings command. It may sound silly, but I got a great workout using this command during a CTF competition that a friend of mine created and ran at a well-known application security conference, for which I also had the pleasure of providing training. I participated in this CTF both years I was at the conference just because I wanted to do better than I did the previous year. He definitely had a sneaky way of trying to hide strings in ELF binaries, often using phrases similar to names of functions in the C programming language. However, what I really appreciated about his binary challenges was the repetition of using strings. I'm a firm believer that repetition is a great way to learn anything, but especially Linux shell commands.
However, the strings command...
