In this tutorual will go over the most useful netcat commands. Netcat is a tool that every IT professional should have in their tool box, if you’re responsible for network or systems security, it is essential that you understand the capabilities of netcat. The original version of netcat is a UNIX program. Its author is known as Hobbit. He released version 1.1 in March of 1996. Netcat is available for Unix and Windows OS.
Netcat is a featured networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using the TCP/IP protocol. It is designed to be a reliable “back-end” tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities, including: port scanner, backdoor, port redirector, port listener, and lots of other things….Let’s see what we can do with netcat.

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TCP/IP:The TCP/IP protocol is a stack of protocols. consisting of several different protocols, on layes 3 and 4 of the OSI model, including TCP, IP, ARP, DHCP, ICMP, and others.
TCP – Transport Control Protocol: is a layer 4 protocol that is commonly used because it provides an efficient method of reliable bi-directional communication, where computers can transmit and receive data simultaneously.
IP - Internet Protocol: is a layer 3 protocol that provide the addressing system that allows communication on the network, IP is a connectionless protocol which means that it needs of TCP to ensure the reliability of transmitted data.
The TCP 3 way handshake:before you can transfer data from another computer, the sender and the receiver need to complete the TCP 3 way handshake. The handshake is a 3 step process where the client computer establishes a connection with the server computer. All of this is possible through the different types of TCP packets and flags: SYN, SYN/ACK, ACK.
You can see the full 3 way handshake in the following figure. Read the rest of this entry »

In todays hybrid network where Windows and Linux coexist together, I found myself trying to access remote shares from a Linux box and vise versa, having to input credentials to authenticate, well this little tutorial shows a quick and easy way to mount windows network shares in PCLinux with read/write permission, keep in mind that prior to mount the share a user should exist on the remote system in order to authenticate, also notice that the credentials are kept in a clear text file on the Linux box and will be sent during authentication, as it poses a security threat.
click here to view the tutorial