Decrypt the Exfiltrated Database Backup

XOR Cipher Basics

XOR (exclusive OR) is a bitwise operation often misused for "encryption" in real-world breaches. When you XOR plaintext with a repeating key, you get ciphertext. The beauty? XORing the ciphertext with the same key recovers the plaintext—it's perfectly reversible.

The Scenario

During incident response, you recovered a file backup.enc from an attacker's staging server. Logs show they used a short ASCII key to obfuscate it before upload. Your job: decode it.

Attack Vector

Use CyberChef (the "XOR" recipe with UTF8 key), Python (bytes([a ^ b for a, b in zip(data, itertools.cycle(key.encode()))])), or even openssl scripting. Try common keys like "secret", "password", or "backup"—attackers rarely use strong keys for quick obfuscation.

Your Mission

The encrypted blob below hides the flag. Decode it by XORing with the correct key to reveal the original text.