OverTheWire Bandit Level 9->Level 10 - Walkthrough

OverTheWire Bandit Solutions

Introduction

In this post, I will be giving you a walkthrough to the Bandit wargame Level 9->Level 10. We will be using a command "strings" to get the password. 

Goal

Get the password for Level 10 stored in the file data.txt in one of the few human-readable strings, preceded by several ‘=’ characters.

Login Details

Server - bandit.labs.overthewire.org

Port - 2220

Username - bandit9

Password - EN632PlfYiZbn3PhVK3XOGSLNInNE00t

Theory

"strings" command in linux is used to find human-readable strings in files. It searches the file and prints out the printable characters it finds. Please go through this article to know more about the "strings" command.

The grep command does not take input as binary file, therefore we will pass the strings command output to the grep command through the pipe(|).

Solution

SSH into the user bandit9 using the command "ssh bandit9@bandit.labs.overthewire.org -p 2220" and the above password. Type ls to see the file "data.txt" present in the home directory of the user.

Now, type the command "strings data.txt". Notice that it will display all the human-readable characters. 

To get the password, we will pass the output from the above command to the grep command and find the sequence of "=" characters. Type the command "strings data.txt | grep "==="".

This completes the Level 9 walkthrough. Please post your doubts and suggestions in the comment section.