OverTheWire Bandit — Levels 0 to 10

Bandit is the entry-point wargame on OverTheWire. Each level hands you credentials to SSH into the next. It looks trivial, but it quietly drills the Linux fundamentals every red-teamer leans on daily.

The goal is not to "win" — it is to make ls, cat, find, and ssh feel automatic.

Level 0 → 1

Connect over SSH on port 2220:

ssh bandit0@bandit.labs.overthewire.org -p 2220
# password: bandit0

The password for the next level sits in a plain file in the home directory:

cat readme

Level 1 → 2

The file is literally named -, which cat reads as stdin. Reference it by path:

cat ./-

Level 2 → 3

A file with spaces in the name. Quote it or escape the spaces:

cat "spaces in this filename"

Level 3 → 4

The password lives in a hidden file inside inhere/:

ls -la inhere/
cat inhere/...Hiding-From-You

Level 4 → 5

Only one file in inhere/ is human-readable text. Let file classify them, then read the one that comes back as text:

file inhere/*
cat "$(file inhere/* | grep text | cut -d: -f1)"

Level 5 → 6

The password is in a file under inhere/ with a specific fingerprint: human-readable, exactly 1033 bytes, and not executable. Let find filter by all three at once:

find inhere/ -type f -size 1033c ! -executable
cat "$(find inhere/ -type f -size 1033c ! -executable)"

Level 6 → 7

This time the file is somewhere on the whole system — owned by user bandit7, group bandit6, and 33 bytes in size. Silence the permission-denied noise with 2>/dev/null:

find / -type f -user bandit7 -group bandit6 -size 33c 2>/dev/null

Level 7 → 8

The password sits in data.txt, right next to the word millionth. grep pulls the matching line out of thousands:

grep millionth data.txt

Level 8 → 9

The password is the only line in data.txt that appears exactly once. sort groups duplicates so that uniq -u can isolate the single unique line:

sort data.txt | uniq -u

Level 9 → 10

The password is one of a few human-readable strings inside the binary data.txt, preceded by several = characters. strings extracts the readable text, then grep narrows it down:

strings data.txt | grep '===='

Commands worth internalizing

Command	Why it matters
ls -la	Reveals hidden dotfiles and permissions
file	Identifies content type without guessing
find	Filters by size, owner, and permission bits
cat ./-	Escapes filenames that break naive commands
grep	Finds a word or pattern inside noisy files
sort | uniq -u	Isolates the one line that occurs a single time
strings	Extracts readable text from binary data

Takeaway

The early Bandit levels are muscle memory: reading awkward filenames, spotting hidden files, and classifying unknown data. These same reflexes show up later during enumeration on real engagements.