usethebox

Step 0

ssh bandit.labs.overthewire.org -p 2220 -l bandit1

Password from Level 1

Step 1

Faiure is always a good start

ls
ls -al
cat - 
# termainal is hung
# ctrl + c

Why didn't that work?

What does man cat say about standard input in the DESCRIPTION section

Step 2

Read The Scroll of Truth

man bash
# search by typing /
# search for "Redirecting Input"

And Stack Overflow

From: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/16364

Using - as a filename to mean stdin/stdout is a convention that a lot of programs use. It is not a special property of the filename. The kernel does not recognise - as special so any system calls referring to - as a filename will use - literally as the filename.

With bash redirection, - is not recognised as a special filename¹, so bash will use that as the literal filename.

When cat sees the string - as a filename, it treats it as a synonym for stdin. To get around this, you need to alter the string that cat sees in such a way that it still refers to a file called -. The usual way of doing this is to prefix the filename with a path - ./-, or /home/Tim/-. This technique is also used to get around similar issues where command line options clash with filenames, so a file referred to as ./-e does not appear as the -e command line option to a program, for example.

Step 3

cat ./-

or

cat < -

Use the contents of this file as the password for the next level.