Level 5 - OverTheWire Bandit
To know more about OverTheWire, check out my post, Bandit Writeup - OverTheWire. For these walkthroughs, I am using a Linux OS.
Level Goal
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.
Solution
For this level we are moving away from naming conventions and instead dealing with specific file types; in this case human-readable.
From the level description we know the directory where the file is located, so we first move there running the command cd inhere.
Once in there, running the command ls will list everything in the directory. There are ten files in this level, all named pretty similarily but we only one want.
Using the command file ./-file## (change the hashtags to numbers), it will display the type of file.
Human-readable is often listed as ASCII text, so we need to use the file command and cycle through each one until we find the one we are looking for.
The human-readable one is -file07 and once we figure that out, we can run the command cat ./-file07 to output the next levels password.
NOTE: the reason we are including ./ in front of the filename in each command is due to the - at the beginning of it. If we were to run the commands without it, we would get errors about no file existing.
bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$ ls
-file00 -file01 -file02 -file03 -file04 -file05 -file06 -file07 -file08 -file09
bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$ file ./-file00
./-file00: data
...
bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$ file ./-file07
./-file07: ASCII text
bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$ cat ./-file07
[password]