

Level 9

Login to the server using bandit9 and the password.

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:~$ vim data.txt

I inspect the data in vim. It's a binary garbled mess. No newlines. I could use grep to do it, since I know that it's going to start with some equal signs, and the password will be alphanumerical.

It's not straightforward, but grep does turn out to have exactly the options I need.

• -o only show matching part.
• -b show byte offset in file.
• --binary-files=text treat binary files as if they were text.
• -E use extended regex.

• "=[= a-zA-Z0-9]{20,99}" match on equals sign, followed by at least 20 characters composed of equal signs, spaces, or alphanumerical characters.

  bandit9@bandit:~$ grep -ob --binary-files=text -E "=[= a-zA-Z0-9]{20,99}" data.txt 16190:========== truKLdjsbJ5g7yyJ2X2R0o3a5HQJFuLk