introduction.md

Introduction

Ncat is a general-purpose command-line tool for reading, writing, redirecting, and encrypting data across a network. It aims to be the network Swiss Army knife, handling a wide variety of security testing and administration tasks. Ncat is suitable for interactive use or as a network-connected back end for other tools. One of the main advantages of ncat is that it is installed by default on many *NIX systems.

Let's see some usage examples:

ncat 192.168.1.105 3333
# connects ncat in "connect mode, to the mentioned host and port

With the next command we will create a server with the "-l" option which is equivalent to "--listen" option, if we omit the host address netcat will build the server on all the network interfaces, while if we omit the port number, it will use the default port number which is 31337, remember that only root users can bind to a port number lower than 1024. By default ncat uses TCP, but it is possible to use UDP, with the "-u" flag or "--udp" option. When using a TCP server, the server will send the packets to all client, while if we use the UDP option, we'll send data only to the first connected client, since in UDP, there is no list of "connected" clients concept

ncat -l 192.168.1.105 3333

Let's see some variations on this:

ncat -l -u 192.168.1.105 3333
 # in this case we create a UDP
 # server

ncat -l -u -6 192.168.1.105 3333
 # in this case we create a UDP
 # IPv6 server

ncat -l -v 192.168.1.105 3333
 # in this case we create a server
 # in the "verbose" mode, through the "-v" flag

ncat -nlvp localhost 8080
 # in this case we create a server in
 # the "verbose" mode, through the "-v" flag, and with the "-n"
 # option to not resolve the hostnames via dns of the connected
 # clients IP