Level 2 - OverTheWire Bandit

To know more about OverTheWire, check out my post, Bandit Writeup - OverTheWire. For these walkthroughs, I am using a Linux OS.

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Previous Level: Level 1 - File Reading

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Level Goal

The password for the next level is stored in a file called - located in the home directory

Solution

This level from a first glance might seem very easy, however, if you don’t have some experience working with a Linux OS, you may have never seen something like this. - is most often seen when used for setting flags/options with a command, for example -p to set a port for ssh.

Running the command ls will show that the file we’re looking for is in the home directory, and similar to the last level, you might run the command cat <filename> to see what’s in it. When running cat - though, cat will read the - as STDIN and wait for user input.

The way we’ll get around this is by including the file path before the filename, in our case cat ./-. Running this, you will recieve the password to the next level.

bandit1@bandit:~$ ls
-

bandit1@bandit:~$ cat ./-
[password]

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Next Level: Level 3 - Spaces In a Filename

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