OverTheWire: Bandit Level 9
This is going to be a walkthrough of Level 9 of Bandit from OverTheWire Wargames.
We found the password from level 8.
Username: bandit9
Password: UsvVyFSfZZWbi6wgC7dAFyFuR6jQQUhR
From the information given on the website, we know that we need to search the data.txt
file for several ‘=’ characters.
So lets start by SSH-ing into the box and listing the home directory.
The strange thing is though, when we try and cat
or les
s the file, cat
doesn’t produce and output and less
tells us it may be a binary file.
When we run the file
command, we see that data.txt
is in fact just data.
The wording of the goal gives it away a bit, but a command that is used to search through this type of data is called strings
. The purpose of this function is to comb through the data in search of readable strings.
So when we run the command against data.txt
, we get output of all readable strings in the file.
Using what we learnt from pipes and grep
, we can search the output of the strings command for lines containing multiple ‘=’ characters.
And we are given the password to the next level.
To continue, please read my Bandit 10 walkthrough. Level 10
Thank you for reading.