Hands-On Red Team Tactics

Introduction to reverse shell connections

A reverse shell is a type of shell in which the target server connects back to the attacker machine. For example, an attacker finds a target server with port 21/tcp, 80/tcp and 443/tcp in OPEN state and the FTP service running on port 21/tcp is vulnerable. Let's say an attacker exploits this port in order to open another port 1337/tcp on the target server for shell connection, as shown in the following diagram:

Credit goes to https://creately.com/ for network architectural diagrams

The problem arises when the attacker tries to connect to the target server on port 1337/tcp. The attacker is not able ...