Greetings, this is my second write-up, and today I’ll be walking through the Bandit Wargames by OverTheWire. Bandit is a beginner-friendly, level-based wargame focused on Linux, and it’s a great way to sharpen your command-line skills while learning new concepts along the way.

In this walkthrough, I’ll focus on explaining my approach to solving each level, including the commands I use and the reasoning behind them. To keep things fair and spoiler-free, all passwords have been censored so you can follow the process yourself and fully enjoy the game.

Level 0

The goal of this level is for you to log into the game using SSH. The host to which you need to connect is bandit.labs.overthewire.org, on port 2220. The username is bandit0 and the password is bandit0. Once logged in, go to the Level 1 page to find out how to beat Level 1.

• Host: bandit.labs.overthewire.org
• Port: 2220
• Username: bandit0

Once logged in, you can proceed to the Level 1 page to find out how to beat the next level.

Solve: I firstly went to the manual page using the man command, and then used -p argument to provide the port, since we are not connecting on the default port.

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ssh -p 2220 [email protected]

Level 0 → Level 1

The password for the next level is stored in a file called readme located in the home directory. Use this password to log into bandit1 using SSH. Whenever you find a password for a level, use SSH (on port 2220) to log into that level and continue the game.

Solve: After logging in with the credentials provided on level 0, I found the readme file on the home directory, and used the cat command to read the content of it.

I used the password present in the readme file in the bandit0 account to login into the user bandit1.

Level 1 → Level 2

The password for the next level is stored in a file called - located in the home directory

Solve: After listing the files, I noticed a file named -. Attempting to access it directly does not work because a hyphen is interpreted as the start of a command-line option.
To access such files, we explicitly specify the relative path using ./.

Level 2 → Level 3

The password for the next level is stored in a file called --spaces in this filename-- located in the home directory.

Solve: To access files with spaces, you can use quotation marks, e.g., “file name”, around the file name. Since the file name started with a hyphen, I had to use the relative path indicator.

Level 3 → Level 4

The password for the next level is stored in a hidden file in the inhere directory.

Solve: After going into the inhere directory, it initially appeared empty. To display hidden files, I used the -la flags with ls, which revealed the hidden file.

Level 4 → Level 5

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.

Solve: After inspecting the folder inhere, I saw that there are a few files, and only one of them contained the password for the next level, I choose to write a script.

I then wrote a loop to iterate through each file and print its contents.

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for i in {0..9}; do
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  echo -e "\nFile No.: $i\n"
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  cat ./-file0$i
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done

I’ll keep updating this write-up as I work through more levels and learn along the way.