Now while being logged in as the user bandit9, you need to find the password of user bandit10 in order to complete this level.

If you haven’t completed the previous level, do check out the write-up for Level 8 to Level 9, which is present here.

Follow these steps to proceed:

  • Password for this level is stored in a file called data.txt in one of the few human readable strings, preceded by several = characters
  • Now since there are only a few strings that are human readable, we can use the strings command to get those, and then grep the = character to find the string
  • Use the following bash one liner for this:
strings data.txt | grep '=========='
  • This will give you the following output:
========== the
========== password{k
=========== is
========== <password>

Password obtained at the time of writing this write-up: FGUW5ilLVJrxX9kMYMmlN4MgbpfMiqey

Note

Passwords on each of the levels are known to change regularly after a specific interval of time. So instead of skimming through the write-up, it is recommended to solve the challenge by hand.