The Pico-CTF strings it challenge is located in the General Skills Section and is worth 100 Points.

We get handed a file called “strings” and the Challenge is to retrieve the flag within the file without running the file itself. We download the file by using the wget command. Alright. It’s time for file-inspection!
When we try to concatenate file by using cat ./strings we get a lot of gibberish. Thats expected as the strings file actually is a precompiled program. That’s shown by the file-command.

Okay, let’s try different approaches.
As the file is called “strings” why not trying the strings-command? The string-File itself returns a ton of strings. In fact: The returned list is too big to search it manually.

Using the grep-command on the strings-output returns our flag!

That was an easy / short one..