The machine is a fairly standard debian...squashed into an initrd. It's loaded into the machine with "kvm -kernel ... -initrd ... -append ..." Then I've executed the attached script, and cleaned up the remainings of it from the memory. How it was supposed to be solved: (Kudos to Eindbazed for the other way to solve it!) 1. Restore the VM with kvm -m 384 -cpu phenom,vendor=AuthenticAMD -incoming "exec:gzip -d output 7. vi output 8. :set nowrap 9. Read the ASCII art! It's the flag.