Reverse Shell

December 8, 2009

I was recently researching a simple way to create a reverse shell on a remote machine without having to install any additional tools. A general overview of what a reverse shell is may be in order, this page explains the process: http://www.plenz.com/reverseshell

While researching I stumbled upon a great discussion on various methods for doing this. My goal was to start a listener on my system using netcat, then connect to the remote system and establish a reverse shell to my system without using any installed tools on the remote system.

The discussion on the subject can be seen here: http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/reverse-shell-with-bash/. As you can see many interesting ways of achieving this goal have been posted.

The method I ended up using can be seen in the screenshot below.

On the right you see I started netcat on my machine “despina” listening on port 8181. On the left I connect to the remote machine “backup” with an IP of 192.168.4.10. Once I’m on the remote machine I connect back to my machine “despina” using the bash command on the left. Once the command is executed I’m immediately greeted with a shell on my machine.

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