Maintaining access with Ncat

NetCat (Ncat) is a little known yet powerful tool designed to make raw socket connections to network ports. It's a small tool designed to run from one executable file that is easily transferred to a system and can also be renamed to anything to hide the executable within an operating system. Ncat will call back to an attacking server with only user-level access. Ncat is an open source application brought to you by insecure.org, the same fine folks that maintain NMap. Ncat, and its older cousin, nc, both come installed on Kali. Ncat is bundled with any install of NMap.

Actually, as mentioned previously, there are two versions of Ncat. The older version's executable is nc. Nc will also make raw socket connections to any TCP/UDP ports:

The big advantage of Ncat is that it supports SSL encryption, where all of nc's traffic is in clear text. Nc's traffic can sometimes be picked up by IDS/IPS and other security devices. Ncat's traffic can be encrypted and hidden to...