Level 09 – bandit – overthewire

Level Instructions:

“The password for the next level is stored in the file data.txt in one of the few human-readable strings, beginning with several ‘=’ characters.”

bandit9@bandit:~$ ls -la
total 40
drwxr-xr-x  2 root     root     4096 Dec 28  2017 .
drwxr-xr-x 42 root     root     4096 Jul 22 18:42 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root     root      220 Sep  1  2015 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r--  1 root     root     3771 Sep  1  2015 .bashrc
-rw-r--r--  1 root     root      655 Jun 24  2016 .profile
-rw-r-----  1 bandit10 bandit9 19379 Dec 28  2017 data.txt
bandit9@bandit:~$ file data.txt
data.txt: data
bandit9@bandit:~$ strings data.txt | grep "=="
========== theP`
========== password
L========== isA
========== truKLdjsbJ5g7yyJ2X2R0o3a5HQJFuLk

Because the majority of data.txt is not human readable, as revealed by the instructions, we use the command ‘strings’ to access the contents of the file, piping its output into grep, and filtering out those lines with “==”.