OverTheWire Bandit Level 0 Walkthrough

Introduction

OverTheWire is a free online platform to learn and practice security concepts in the form of a game. It has different online and offline "Wargames" like Bandit, Natas, Leviathan, Krypton, Narnia, Behemoth, Utumno, Maze, Vortex, Manpage, Drifter, FormulaOne. Each having its unique name and helping the players learn different security concepts.

In this article, I'll be giving walkthrough of the Wargame Bandit Level 0. There are already walkthroughs present on the internet for these wargames, however, I still decided to publish mine to get comfortable with writing and maybe help someone understand the solutions better.

Goal

Log in to the level 0 with SSH.

Details Provided

Server - bandit.labs.overthewire.org

Port - 2220

Username - bandit0

Password - bandit0

Explaination

This level wants the player to use SSH which is short for Secure SHell Protocol. SSH is used for connecting securely over the internet and main applications include remote login and command-line execution. It will establish a command-line connection i.e encrypt the connection so the password and other data remains secure.

Since SSH is Unix based and Linux and OS X are derived from Unix, therefore, Linux and Mac OS come with already installed SSH on their platforms. For Windows, we need to install SSH client program like Cygwin or PuTTY which are free.

You can explore more on the internet about these concepts and get more insights.

Solution

I had installed Linux on Oracle virtual box on my windows system and used the Linux terminal to SSH into the machine. The command to use is below-:

ssh <username>@<server> -p <portnumber>

The username, server and portnumber need to be replaced with the provided values in the above command. <server> can either be a valid URL or an IP address. After updating the command with the provided values, it will lead to below command-:

ssh bandit0@bandit.labs.overthewire.org -p 2220

On executing the above command, you will be prompted for the password which you can provide as bandit0. 

Note- in Linux terminal, the password is not displayed when you type it.

On entering the correct password, you will be able to log into the remote machine and see the welcome text along with more information about the game.

This concludes Level 0. 

Please explore the internet to know more about the used commands.