Let's break down each step in this recipe further and examine the output of each command or tool we ran. In step 1, we used the file command against the file to help us to figure out what kind of file we're dealing with:
So, it appears we're dealing with an ELF formatted executable compiled for a 32-bit Intel processor. Excellent. Next, we run strings against the file in step 2 to see whether anything stands out:
Interesting! The first thing we see that should trigger some mental alarms are found on the first and second lines ...
