academy.security.krd

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Two clocks disagree

Medium · 20 points

A file's metadata from one workstation, and the firewall's record of what that workstation was doing.

The file claims to have been created, modified and last accessed at one moment in February. The firewall says something else happened in March. Both are telling the truth about different things.

Three of the four file timestamps can be set to whatever a program likes. One of them is maintained by the filesystem itself and is awkward to forge. Put every timestamp on one axis, see which cluster each falls into, and name the field that agrees with the firewall.

Submit it as the flag, exactly as it is labelled: skrd{...}.

Artefact

-- file metadata, host ws-031 -----------------------------------
  path              C:\Users\Public\svc-update.tmp
  Modified (M)      2026-02-03T09:14:02Z
  Accessed (A)      2026-02-03T09:14:02Z
  Created   (B)     2026-02-03T09:14:02Z
  MFT changed (C)   2026-03-11T02:48:19Z

-- firewall session log ------------------------------------------
  2026-03-11T02:47:55Z  ws-031 -> 203.0.113.44:443  established
  2026-03-11T02:48:31Z  ws-031 -> 203.0.113.44:443  1.4MB out
  2026-03-11T02:51:02Z  ws-031 -> 203.0.113.44:443  closed
Hint

Three timestamps agree to the second and sit a month before the session. The fourth does not, and it is the one an attacker cannot set from user space.