Reverse Shell VS Bind Shell
Netcat reverse shells
The very popular usage of Netcat and probably the most common use from a penetration testing perspective are reverse shells and bind shells. A reverse shell is a shell initiated from the target host back to the attack box which is in a listening state to pick up the shell. A bind shell is set up on the target host and binds to a specific port to listens for an incoming connection from the attack box. In malicious software, a bind shell is often revered to as a backdoor.
In the following paragraphs, we will be demonstrating the use of bind and reverse shell. We will be using port 4444 throughout this tutorial but please note that this can be an open port instead. In fact, often you need to use more common ports like 80 and 443 to set up reverse shells as it is more common for these ports to be open.
Netcat Bind Shell
As we’ve mentioned earlier in this Hacking with Netcat tutorial a bind shell is a shell that binds to a specific port on the target host to listen for incoming connections. Let’s have a look at the visualization of a bind Netcat shell:
In this visualization, the target binds a Bash shell to port 4444 using a Netcat listener. The attacker connects to this port using a simple Netcat command. The steps to set up a bind shell are as following:
- Bind a bash shell to port 4444 using Netcat.
- Connect to the target host on port 4444 from the attack box.
- Issue commands on the target host from the attack box.
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