These first few posts on the CTF challenges at ‘Over the Wire’ will be pretty short and basic which I am ok with, the whole purpose of ‘Over the Wire’ is to go from being an absolute beginner with ‘Bandit0 to Bandit34’ through to the others like Narnia and Maze.
Suggested order to play the games in
- Bandit
- Leviathan or Natas or Krypton
- Narnia
- Behemoth
- Utumno
- Maze
Each shell game has its own SSH port, information about how to connect to each game using SSH, is provided in the top left corner of the page. Keep in mind that every game uses a different SSH port.
For Bandit0 it says:-
“Note for beginners
This game, like most other games, is organised in levels. You start at Level 0 and try to “beat” or “finish” it. Finishing a level results in information on how to start the next level. The pages on this website for “Level <X>” contain information on how to start level X from the previous level. E.g. The page for Level 1 has information on how to gain access from Level 0 to Level 1. All levels in this game have a page on this website, and they are all linked to from the side menu on the left of this page.
You will encounter many situations in which you have no idea what you are supposed to do. Don’t panic! Don’t give up! The purpose of this game is for you to learn the basics. Part of learning the basics is reading a lot of new information.
There are several things you can try when you are unsure of how to continue:
First, if you know a command, but don’t know how to use it, try the manual (man page) by entering “man <command>” (without the quotes). e.g. if you know about the “ls” command, type: man ls. The “man” command also has a manual, try it. Press q to quit the man command.
Second, if there is no man page, the command might be a shell built-in. In that case, use the “help <X>” command. E.g. help cd
Also, your favourite search engine is your friend. Learn how to use it! I recommend Google.
Lastly, if you are still stuck, you can join us on IRC
You’re ready to start! Begin with Level 0, linked at the left of this page. Good luck!
Note for VMs: You may fail to connect to overthewire.org via SSH with a “broken pipe error” when the network adapter for the VM is configured to use NAT mode. Adding the setting IPQoS throughput to /etc/ssh/ssh_config should resolve the issue. If this does not solve your issue, the only option then is to change the adapter to Bridged mode.”
So let’s begin.
Bandit Level 0
Level Goal
- 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.
As I said, very basic which is great as you can not feel daunted at all going into it, I have a fair amount of Linux experience from a previous job and because I use it a lot at home so the first few for me was easy.
We need to connect to the game using SSH so simple enough as the command is just SSH, we need to use the username bandit0 to connect to bandit.labs.overthewire.org on port 2220.
The command is:-
SSH bandit0@ bandit.labs.overthewire.org -p 2220
To break it down SSH(to SSH on) badit0(username)@(use the username @ this address) bandit.labs.overthewire.org(address to connect to) -p(port to use) 2220(port address).
It’s quite funny because I did spend about 25 minutes failing at this because I read the port as 2200 and not 2220, really need to wear my glasses more.
I did toy with doing walkthroughs for 0 to 5 then 5 to 10 etc but I like the idea of having each in its own post.
Bandit0 = https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/bandit0.html