Re: Ideas on netcat

[Penetration Testing <pentest () infosecure com au>]

On 24 Aug 2001, Vo0d0o wrote:

> As far as I know, no site is giving some other uses of netcat
> pertaining to pen-testing ...other than the usual *README* file which
> I find too basic.
>
> I would be grateful if anybody could throw some light on uses of
> netcat in pen-testing.

What do you want to do with it?  Netcat, like many other tools is not
intended to be specifically a penetration testing tool.  As it happens, it
is often quite handy in penetration testing.

If you have an idea of what netcat does, and you know what you want to do,
it should not be rocket science to put the two together.

For example, I have used netcat in the past in scripts to gather web
server versions from a range of addresses...

1. Create a file containing the following:
HEAD / HTTP/1.0<ret><ret>

2. Cat this file to netcat, pointed at a web server address:
cat file | netcat -v -w 2 127.0.0.1 80 > output

The output file will contain the HEAD output from the web server.

Like I said, it is a great tool, but it does not have any magical
penetration testing properties. :-)

Regards,
Dave Taylor


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