Nice netcat... was an easy challenge worth 10 points.

Description

There is a nice program that you can talk to by using this command in a shell: $ nc mercury.picoctf.net 22342, but it doesn't speak English...

Solving

Connecting to this host with netcat, I was presented with several numbers which appeared to be “character codes”, which are the decimal representation of ASCII characters.

Character codes come up a lot in CTFs and programming. You can recognize that some data may be character codes if you are presented with several numbers between 30 and 127.

This was easily decoded with CyberChef. Remember to use the correct base in the From Charcode ingredient: