Oh no! A hacker has taken control of my computer!

Question

It seems that some guy called Magick has taken over my computer. Well, there does not seem to be any harmful stuff done at least, but this picture keeps appearing on my screen.

"HACKED by Magick"? What the ...? This guy thinks he is a magician with computers?

I also get a popup box asking for a password in order to get rid of all that, but I have no idea where to get that password. You guys seem to be pretty good at solving puzzles in here. Could you help me, please?

EDIT: The hacker, seeing I'm not advancing so well, gave me a hint:

Several steps: magical decipher, remove center, line out, subtract, play.

After your comment, I realized I probably had the right idea. Turns out my "ensure new line at end of file" setting in sublime was messing it up. On to part two. — Quark, Apr 06 '16 at 20:28
I'm stuck on the second part, tried multiple audio extractors with no luck. Needs more hints to be less guess-and-check. If you want to allow partial answers I can post the first part. — Quark, Apr 06 '16 at 21:01
@Quark, It's up to you to give your partial answer, but that will not count as a full answer of course ! — fffred, Apr 06 '16 at 22:02
@Quark can you post the partial answer..maybe we can work on this as a community? — stackErr, Apr 07 '16 at 03:54

score 11 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 09 '16 at 03:31

11

Partial Answer:

Magick gives the hint that ImageMagick (a popular image manipulation software suite) is used. You need to create a file with the password in it, then use ImageMagick's -decipher option. In this case the password is HACKED. On Linux the commands for this are:
echo -n HACKED > pass
convert 6SIFG.png -decipher pass decoded.png
The -n option is necessary to prevent echo from adding a trailing newline to the end of the file.

After all that, you get the following deciphered image:

Following is 2012rcampion's work:

If you treat the image data as 16-bit audio samples and play them at 44100Hz you get a computer-generated voice saying "cipher." Using Mathematica: ListPlay[Flatten@Import["https://i.stack.imgur.com/ikSJG.png", "Data"], SampleRate -> 44100]

According to the OP's comment, the password is:

cipher

edited Apr 09 '16 at 03:31

2012rcampion

18,915
3
66
98

answered Apr 08 '16 at 05:48

Quark

6,077
1
20
46

4

If you treat the image data as 16-bit audio samples and play them at 44100Hz you get a robovoice saying "cipher." (For my future reference: ListPlay[Flatten@Import["http://i.stack.imgur.com/ikSJG.png", "Data"], SampleRate -> 44100]) – 2012rcampion Apr 08 '16 at 07:18
1

...the challenge now is which cipher, and which of the unused parts of the image is the ciphertext? My guess is that that's what "line out, subtract" and the 6000 are referring to. – 2012rcampion Apr 08 '16 at 07:24
Not really @Campion, the 6000 is for having a zeroed background from unsigned to signed int. The word you found is intended to be the password. Sorry the story didn't go further! – fffred Apr 08 '16 at 07:51

Oh no! A hacker has taken control of my computer!

1 Answers1