Netcat Power Tools

Chapter 5. The Dark Side of Netcat

Solutions in this chapter:

• Sniffing Traffic within a System
• Rogue Tunnel Attacks
• Backdoors and Shell Shoveling
• Netcat on Windows
• Summary

Introduction

Throughout this book, you have read about the tremendous benefits of netcat, both from a network administrative position, as well as for those who perform legitimate penetration testing. Unfortunately, just like most network tools, netcat can be employed to assist in illegal activities, and is flagged and quarantined by many anti-virus applications. The reason for this is because illegal hacking attacks often require the use of a backdoor, and netcat fits that requirement quite handily. There seems to be an assumption that if netcat is on a system it is not ...