The password for the next level is stored in the file data.txt in one of the few human-readable strings, preceded by several = characters.

Here are the details which we have from the previous level:

  • Host: bandit.labs.overthewire.org
  • Port: 2220
  • Username: bandit9
  • Password: 4CKMh1JI91bUIZZPXDqGanal4xvAg0JM

So, The SSH syntax will be:

sshpass -p 4CKMh1JI91bUIZZPXDqGanal4xvAg0JM ssh [email protected] -p 2220

As we know from the hint, the password for the next level is stored in the data.txt file in one of the few human-readable strings, preceded by several = characters. So, We can easily retrieve it using the grep command, but since data.txt is not in ASCII text, we need to use the strings command to extract only those characters that fall within the ASCII character set:

  1. View the contents of data.txt:

    ls
data.txt

  2. Determine the file type of data.txt:

    file data.txt
data.txt: data

    The file command indicates that data.txt contains generic data.

  3. Search for human-readable strings preceded by ‘=’:

    strings data.txt | grep '='