Level 10

Objectives

  1. SSH to user bandit9
  2. Read the password from data.txt from a human-readable string beginning with several =.

Objective 1

  • Username: bandit9
  • Password: UsvVyFSfZZWbi6wgC7dAFyFuR6jQQUhR
  • Port: 2220
  • IP/Hostname: bandit.labs.overthewire.org
user@localhost:~$ ssh -p 2220 [email protected]

Success!

Objective 2

A give away from the description is that there are human-readable strings in this file. Typically a .txt file is all human-readable.

Check the file with the file command.

bandit9@bandit:~$ file data.txt 
data.txt: data

This isn't a human-readable file, it's a binary. We can search through binary files with the strings command. It's similar to cat in this aspect.

Before we do that, since we know we're looking for "several =", we can pipe that into grep with a couple =.

bandit9@bandit:~$ strings data.txt | grep '=='
2========== the
========== password
========== isa
========== truKLdjsbJ5g7yyJ2X2R0o3a5HQJFuLk