> We decided to purchase a VPS in Azure in the Germany region. Running the script there improved the Nginx PID retrieval significantly (30 seconds to 5 seconds) but the exploit still didn’t show results. Eventually, we noticed the new VPS only had 4 cores. We spent a few more $ to buy a 16-core VM in Germany, and got the flag within 5 seconds!

I love CTFs :) Good job on the solves and writeup!

Thanks! :) We love CTFs too!