NetCat is called as Swiss Army Knife. Very useful tool for Administrators, Security Testers.
Netcat is a simple Unix utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using TCP or UDP protocol. It is designed to be a reliable "back-end" tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities. Netcat, or "nc" as the actual program is named, should have been supplied long ago as another one of those cryptic but standard Unix tools.
Some of netcat's major features are:
o Outbound or inbound connections, TCP or UDP, to or from any ports
o Full DNS forward/reverse checking, with appropriate warnings
o Ability to use any local source port
o Ability to use any locally-configured network source address
o Built-in port-scanning capabilities, with randomizer
o Built-in loose source-routing capability
o Can read command line arguments from standard input
o Slow-send mode, one line every N seconds
o Hex dump of transmitted and received data
o Optional ability to let another program service established connections
o Optional telnet-options responder
Prerequisites – Two hosts having nc-traditional installed on it.
Firewall, Selinux, apparmour should be disable.
HostA -> Will act as NC server and HostB -> NC client.
Examples:
1. On HostA
$ nc -l -p 1234
On HostB
$ telnet HostA 1234
It will show below output after connection
Trying 10.77.25.160…
Connected to ps6108u.persistent.co.in (10.77.25.160).
Escape character is ‘^]’.
Now Just type anything on HostB and As soon as You will be able to see it on HostA
2. Run a UDP server with nc
On HostA
$ nc -l -u -p 1234
On HostB
$ nc -u HostA 1234
And try same stuff as above.
3. Stream video on HostB from HostA
On HostB
$ nc -l -p 1234 | mplayer -cache 8192
On HostA
$ cat video.mpg | nc HostB 1234
4. File Transfer with nc From HostA to HostB
On HostB
$ nc -l -p 1234 >newfile
On HostA
$ nc HostB 1234 <origfile
5. Open Backdoor and allow to execute command on HostB
On HostB
$ nc -l -p 1234 -e /bin/bash
On HostA
$ nc HostB 1234
And now try to run command. Those commands will get executed at HostB
6. Port scanning with NetCat
On HostA
$ nc -z HostB 1-1023
It will give you list of Open Ports (range 1 to 1023) on HostB.
