Netcat and Ncat

ed to the website vEveryone sometimes needs to get some data from one machine to another. If you do not want to configure e.g. FTP or HTTP server, so you need some simple program that can do it. In that case I recommend using Netcat or its newer replacement Ncat.

Netcat probably needs no introduction. It’s been with us since 1995 and is a “universal tool for reading and writing TCP and UDP connections”. Ncat was created only in this century and it also boasts about it – Ncat – Netcat for the 21st century .

The concept is as simple as it gets

On one machine, open Netcat to listen on some port and connect from the other machine. The condition is to enable the corresponding port on the firewall.

So we start with the original Netcat, also known as nc in Linux . On the

From any machine, we then connect to the machine with IP

 

The result will look like this. Whatever we type in one or the other console is transferred to the opposite side.

 

 

So we have a TCP connection. Well, since Linux is one big pipe, as my former colleague used to say, to transfer files we just need to send the file to the created “pipe”.

And I already hear that it is dangerous, the transmission is not encrypted, etc. Yes, it’s not safe. For one-time purposes, this is enough. An attacker would have to hit a specific port and time when the connection is active. Of course, we can use ssh and create an encrypted tunnel, but this is where elegance and simplicity are lost.

So let’s take a look at Netcat’s successor

from the Nmap developer’s workshop .

Right after running the ncat -h quick help , we see that some options have increased and some have decreased. The biggest difference is that port scanning has disappeared and ssl options have been added. In other words, yes ncat can do ssl directly the secret to turning around a day that starts off unproductively without the need to use other tools. Plus, it works on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and of course it’s open source, so you can translate it for any operating system.

So let’s transfer, for example, database russia phone number data backups from a Debian server to a Windows workstation. Let’s say that we have a backup in the file . So on the server we call:

phone number data

On workstations with Windows, we start cmd and then:

 

Once the file is uploaded, the cg leads connection is closed.isitor when the mouse hovers over the photo.

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