While these are fun at times, I think one huge problem about these is scope creep - the way these are set up, it starts blurring between what’s in scope for the challenge vs reality. IIRC one of the previous challenges linked to a legit website, not owned by the challenge creator.
reconvillage ctf did a good job of mixing in real sites for challenges. As an example of the types of problem sets, I’m linking our dearest keramas writeups from the latest reconvillage:
I have solved it now as well. It was really in front of me, I just needed a more structured way of trying different combinations.
Anyway, my tip for this one. There is no need to go deeper into the link of the previous challenge.
I got some false positive passwords on the zip where the password worked but it got a crc error. That sent me on a wild goosechase of fixing the zip until I started over and got through the challenge.