Connect to the server using the following credentials:

Server: bandit.labs.overthewire.org
Port: 2220
Username: bandit9
Password: UsvVxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Level Goal is:

The password for the next level is stored in the file data.txt in one of the few human-readable strings, beginning with several ‘=’ characters.

Let us first check, which file type the file ‘file.txt’ has:

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bandit9@bandit:~$ file data.txt
data.txt: data

It is a data file, no plaintext ASCII file. We can use the strings command to get all available strings in this file and pipe the output to grep to look for the pattern ’=’:

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bandit9@bandit:~$ strings data.txt | grep '='
2========== the
========== password
>t=     yP
rV~dHm=
========== isa
=FQ?P\U
=       F[
pb=x
J;m=
=)$=
========== truKxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
iv8!=