Netcat – The TCP/IP Swiss Army Knife

Netcat is a tool that every security professional should be aware of and possibly have in their ‘security tool box’. In May/June of 2000, insecure.org conducted a survey of 1200 Nmap users from the Nmap- ackers mailing list to determine their favorite security tools. Netcat was the second most popular tool, not including Nmap1. A quick search on securityportal (www.securityportal.com) found 166 matches of netcat. Most of the matches describe or use netcat in some way. Netcat is a utility that is able to write and read data across TCP and UDP network connections. If you are responsible for network or system security it essential that you understand the capabilities of netcat.

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Read the complete paper at SANS