Cryptography has a pretty steep learning curve, and while doing CTFs and other conference games that have crypto challenges, very rarely do they involve practical use cases. As a security professional, it’s important not just to know how to decrypt something, but how to recognize the the type of cryptography used, many times without the source code or manual to aide you. This talk dives into not Alice and Bob, but actual steps used in pentests and incident response scenarios to identify and decrypt random data found in the real world.