Bandit: Level 4 - Level 5

Level 4

Username: bandit4
Password: 2WmrDFRmJIq3IPxneAaMGhap0pFhF3NJ

Task:

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.

Commands you may need to solve this level
ls , cd , cat , file , du , find

Start

Let’s begin by connecting to the server bandit.labs.overthewire.org and logging in with user bandit4 on port 2220.

We have several commands available for this task:

• ls
• cd
• cat
• file
• du
• find

Solve the level

First we check the environment. We move to the folder inhere with cd and check the content of the folder.

bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$ cd ..
bandit4@bandit:~$ cd inhere/
bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$ ls -la
total 48
drwxr-xr-x 2 root    root    4096 Jul 17 15:57 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root    root    4096 Jul 17 15:57 ..
-rw-r----- 1 bandit5 bandit4   33 Jul 17 15:57 -file00
-rw-r----- 1 bandit5 bandit4   33 Jul 17 15:57 -file01
-rw-r----- 1 bandit5 bandit4   33 Jul 17 15:57 -file02
-rw-r----- 1 bandit5 bandit4   33 Jul 17 15:57 -file03
-rw-r----- 1 bandit5 bandit4   33 Jul 17 15:57 -file04
-rw-r----- 1 bandit5 bandit4   33 Jul 17 15:57 -file05
-rw-r----- 1 bandit5 bandit4   33 Jul 17 15:57 -file06
-rw-r----- 1 bandit5 bandit4   33 Jul 17 15:57 -file07
-rw-r----- 1 bandit5 bandit4   33 Jul 17 15:57 -file08
-rw-r----- 1 bandit5 bandit4   33 Jul 17 15:57 -file09
bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$

I prefer to use ls -la because it lists additional to hidden files also the permissions. We can see 10 files and one of them contents the password for the next level.

We have to consider, what we want to use, so lets check the commands again.

The command file looks promising.

Lets give it a try. With ./* we can tell the command, that it should check every file in the current folder.

bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$ file ./*
./-file00: data
./-file01: data
./-file02: data
./-file03: data
./-file04: data
./-file05: data
./-file06: data
./-file07: ASCII text
./-file08: data
./-file09: data
bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$

We can see, that file07 contains an ASCII text. Lets check this file.

bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$ cat ./-file07
4oQYVPkxZOOEOO5pTW81FB8j8lxXGUQw
bandit4@bandit:~/inhere$

Perfect - we have the password for the new level.

Password: 4oQYVPkxZOOEOO5pTW81FB8j8lxXGUQw

Explanation:

The file command is useful for identifying what type of content a file contains, such as ELF, Perl script, ASCII text, or data. In this context, we’re specifically interested in files that are human-readable, typically encoded in ASCII or Unicode. For instance, ELF files aren’t readable by humans—if you attempt to display their content, you’d see a series of random, unreadable characters.

When you need to apply a command to all files in a directory, manually typing each filename is impractical. Instead, you can use the wildcard *, which represents any sequence of characters. This allows you to run a command on multiple files simultaneously. For example, file* would match files such as file00, file, and fileXYZ.