Level 24 -> Level 25

  1. login
ssh bandit24@bandit.labs.overthewire.org -p 2220
# on password prompt I gave the new password fromt he previous level
  1. find password

I needed to create a file having all the combinations and pass them to the listening program on port 30002. I used nc to send my data to it.

>>> with open('passes', 'w') as f:
...   for i in range(10000):
...     f.write('UoMYT1rfrBFHyQXmg6gzctqAwOmw1IohZ {:04d}'.format(i))
...
>>>

Note: I have changed the password for level 24 in the above snippet because it is good to find that yourself.

This was quite tough to brute force and I failed at it many times. HOwever, creating this file using the above script, inside the Python console was quite helpful. Challenge was to pass the values to the listening program on port 30002. I was able to do it in 02 steps.

# step 1
cat passes | nc localhost 30002 > results
# step 2
cat results | uniq

I faced many pitfalls such as running background process using &, trying multithreading to save on time. Waiting for shell script to try all attempts; It was damn slow and bandit server was getting disconnected because of the timeout. The above step1 also crashed around 7000 tries, I had to bring remaining 3000 attemps in passes to another file to try out the command as shown below.

# step 1
cat passes_7000 | nc localhost 30002 > results_7000
# step 2
cat results_7000 | uniq

After this I was quite happy to see the password on the console. Anyways, I am feeling both happy and sad. I have reached another level in the game. I have become quite slow in finding the solutions. Therefore, I will continue writing about other levels in my next post.