Bandit: Level 7 - Level 8

Level 7

Username: bandit7
Password: morbNTDkSW6jIlUc0ymOdMaLnOlFVAaj

Task:

https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/bandit8.html

The password for the next level is stored in the file data.txt next to the word millionth

Commands you may need to solve this level
man, grep, sort, uniq, strings, base64, tr, tar, gzip, bzip2, xxd

Start

Let’s begin by connecting to the server bandit.labs.overthewire.org and logging in with user bandit7 on port 2220.

We have several commands available for this task:

• man
• grep
• sort
• uniq
• strings
• base65
• tr
• tar
• gzip
• bzip2
• xxd

Exploring commands

We got some new commands here, so lets see what they do:

man (1)              - an interface to the system reference manuals
grep (1)             - print lines that match patterns
sort (1)             - sort lines of text files
uniq (1)             - report or omit repeated lines
strings (1)          - print the sequences of printable characters in files
base64 (1)           - base64 encode/decode data and print to standard output
tr (1)               - translate or delete characters
tar (1)              - an archiving utility
gzip (1)             - compress or expand files
bzip2 (1)            - a block-sorting file compressor, v1.0.8
xxd (1)              - make a hex dump or do the reverse.

Solve the level

This level should introduce you to piping | the output and use grep. This is very essential and crucial to “forward the output” via | and search via grep.

Pipes in Linux allow you to pass the output of one command directly as input to another command, enabling you to combine and process data efficiently in a command-line pipeline.

Lets try it:

bandit7@bandit:~$ cat data.txt |grep millionth
millionth       dfwvzFQi4mU0wfNbFOe9RoWskMLg7eEc

As you can see, we check the output of data.txt with cat and pass the output to the grepcommand where we search for the keyword millionth.

Password: dfwvzFQi4mU0wfNbFOe9RoWskMLg7eEc

Explanation:

Using grep with Pipes (|) in Linux

In the Linux command line, you can use grep in combination with pipes (|) to filter and search for specific patterns in the output of other commands. Here’s how it works:

• grep: This command searches for text patterns in files or input provided to it. For example, grep 'pattern' file.txt will search for the term “pattern” in file.txt and display the matching lines.

• Pipes (|): The pipe symbol (|) takes the output of one command and sends it as input to another command. This allows you to chain commands together to process data in stages.