⚒ Upgrade your Hacking Tools 🛠

Netcat, Nmap, Gobuster, these are all staple tools in the ethical hacking world. If you frequent Hack the Box, Try Hack Me or any other ethical hacking lab platform, you likely use the aforementioned tools very often. What if you could upgrade those tools?

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Upgrade may be a dramatic word, but the hacking tools that this article is going to go over were developed to work faster and/or better than the usual tool. Pwncat, Feroxbuster, Rustcan and Updog is what will be reviewed.

Pwncat

The upgrade for Netcat. In pen testing lab environments you’re constantly exploiting Remote Command Execution vulnerabilities and need netcat to receive call backs for shells. But what if those shells could be more functional, persistent, automated and cool looking? This is among what Pwncat has to offer. Pwncat has all the flexibility of Netcat with a lot of extra features.

More functionally because when you establish a shell, pwncat establishes a PseudoTerminal to make it just like an SSH session with history, tab completion, line editing, and graphical terminal applications. Build into the shell are upload and download commands that make file transfer easy. It even doubles as an SSH client:

There are also plenty of built in modules that automate privesc from the enumeration to the actual execution. There are also modules that automate persistence and help monitor tampered with files if you’re trying to be stealthy. If you happen to need a static binary, there is a busybox command to help if a program you want is missing on your target system.

Install with pip:

pip install git+https://github.com/calebstewart/pwncat.git

This is a fairly extensive program; here is a great video that goes into detail about how it works:

Feroxbuster

Netcat is to Pwncat as Gobuster is to Feroxbuster. Feroxbuster is the upgrade to your directory…