OverTheWire: Bandit Level 10

In the last post, we gained access to bandit9. Now, let’s find the password for bandit10.

Level 10

Bandit Level 9 → Level 10

Level Goal

The password for the next level is stored in the file data.txt in one of the few human-readable strings, preceded by several ‘=’ characters.

Commands you may need to solve this level

grep, sort, uniq, strings, base64, tr, tar, gzip, bzip2, xxd

The file command helped us determine which files were human readable among other files.

But now, we need to figure out which lines of a given file are human readable. For this, we have the strings command.

This command returns only the human readable strings in a given file, ignoring the other non-ASCII characters.

But even just this command alone is going to return a lot of strings we don’t need.

preceded by several ‘=’ characters.

From this line, we know that we’re looking for a line the contains several ‘=’ characters. To narrow down our search based on this information, we can use the grep command along with the strings command.

bandit9@bandit:~$ strings data.txt | grep "=="
========== the*2i"4
========== password
Z)========== is
&========== truKLdjsbJ5g7yyJ2X2R0o3a5HQJFuLk

Now, we’ve narrowed the results down to four strings. Based on the previous passwords, it is safe to assume that the password is truKLdjsbJ5g7yyJ2X2R0o3a5HQJFuLk.

Happy Hacking!