Bandit: Level 1 - Level 2

Bandit: Level 1 - Level 2

Level 1

Username: bandit1
Password: ZjLjTmM6FvvyRnrb2rfNWOZOTa6ip5If

Task:

Start

Let’s begin by connecting to the server bandit.labs.overthewire.org and logging in with user bandit1 on port 2220.

We have several commands available for this task:

• ls
• cd
• cat
• file
• du
• find

Exploring Commands

Let’s see what these commands do:

It looks like we could use cat for printing out the text in our file.

Solve the level

First, check if the file is there with ls.

Now, let’s try to print out our file named - with the command:

cat - 

Alright, nothing seems to happen. We can cancel that with CTRL + C.

It seems we need to adjust our command to display a file with a special character. Let’s do a quick Google search as mentioned in the task.

Voilá! We found the answer.

Let’s try it out:

cat ./-

That worked!

Now we have the password for Level 2:

263JGJPfgU6LtdEvgfWU1XP5yac29mFx

Explanation:

Special interpretation of -: In many command-line utilities, the - character is a special convention that means “read from standard input” rather than from a file. When you type cat -, the command expects you to enter text directly, which it will then display.

Using ./-: By using ./-, you’re explicitly specifying the path to the file. The ./ tells the shell to look in the current directory for a file named -, instead of interpreting it as stdin.