// what it is
Description
Ancient (1995!) and indispensable. Speaks raw TCP/UDP — used for port scanning, file transfer, banner grabbing, and the canonical reverse/bind shell setups. Several implementations exist (Hobbit's original, OpenBSD nc, ncat from the Nmap project).
// use cases
What people use it for
- Reverse / bind shell listener
- Port banner grab
- Ad-hoc file transfer
// commands
The commands you'll type
Listen on 4444
$ nc -lvnp 4444Banner grab
$ nc target.tld 80 <<< 'GET / HTTP/1.0\r
\r
'File transfer
$ nc -lvnp 9001 > out.bin # receiver
nc target.tld 9001 < in.bin # sender