Bandit Level 4 To 5

13 Mar 2022 - mike

Level 4 -> 5

Game Instructions

The password for the next level is stored in the only human-readable file in the inhere directory. Tip: if your terminal is messed up, try the “reset” command.

Let’s go ahead and login with the next level bandit4

ssh -p 2220 bandit4@bandit.labs.overthewire.org
password: pIwrPrtPN36QITSp3EQaw936yaFoFgAB

By the instructions of the game, let’s go ahead and execute the reset command. Just to clear things up.

Now the game is telling us that we need to find the only human-readable file in the inhere directory.

Let’s cd into the inhere directory to get to work:

cd inhere

When we ls this directory, we’ll see a bunch of files starting with that pesky - that we came across earlier. So we know that we’re going to have to use ./ to cat them effectively.

This particular exercise is best tackled manually. We’ll simply cat each file and look for human-readable text:

cat ./-file00 ./-file01 ./-file02 ./-file03 ./-file04 ./-file05 ./-file06 ./-file07 ./-file08 ./-file09

??????????~%	C[?걱>??| ????U"7?w???H??ê?Q??(???#????T?v??(?ִ?????A*?
2J?Ş؇_?y7?.A??u??#???w$N?c?-??Db3??=???=<?W?????ht?Z??!??{?U    ?+??pm???;??:D??^??@?gl?Q??@?%@???ZP*E??1?V???̫*????
koReBOKuIDDepwhWk7jZC0RTdopnAYKh
FPn?  '?U???M??/u XS
?mu?z???хN?{??Y?d4????]3?????9(?

Do you see the human-readable text? Yep! That’s right:

koReBOKuIDDepwhWk7jZC0RTdopnAYKh

Now we have the password for bandit5