For the past month Foursys’ customers have been scratching their heads trying to solve the Foursys Puzzle. Ten puzzlers successfully deciphered the riddle with the first five bagging a sort after Foursys mug each.
However, there could only be one winner of the star prize, the Amazon Kindle, and that fell to Karl Kroger of Ipswich Hospital who was second fastest with the answer but first out of the hat.
“I am delighted to have been the lucky one whose name was drawn out to win.” Said Kroger “I really enjoyed solving the puzzle and I hope there is more in the near future!”.
Andy Wool (left) presenting the Amazon Kindle to Puzzle winner Karl Koger (right)
Special mention should go to Andy Tatarczuk (@AndyTats) of Derbyshire Health Informatics Service who completed this technically difficult challenge in the speediest time. Well done Andy!
So how did Andy, Karl and the others complete the puzzle? This is how:
1. Realise that the clues are "in the picture", in the sense that they're hidden in the code
2. Look at the code of the picture and find the encrypted URL for our ZIP file, it looks like this:
sbheflf.pb.hx/pbzcrgvgvba/xvaqyr.mvc
3. Decode that URL back to the real one
4. Download the Zip file and find out it has a password
5. The password is also encrypted in the picture file, and looks like this
01001011 01101001 01101110 01100100 01101100 01100101 01010011 01110101 01110010 01110000 01110010 01101001 01110011 01100101 00100001
6. Open the file with the decrypted password, and ta da!
SOFTWARE USED
ROT13, Caesar cipher & Google convert binary to text
So there you have it. Definitely not for the faint hearted and we’d like to thank everyone who took the time to attempt to complete the first ever Foursys Puzzle and many congratulations to those who did.
Another Foursys Puzzle is waiting in the wings with another great prize attached to it so stay tuned and follow us on Twitter for the inside scoop!
@FoursysLtd | #foursyspuzzle
