TryHackMe

Once a vulnerability is discovered in any given IT system, one common payload a malicious attacker often wants to deliver is a reverse shell. From the black-hat attacker’s perspective, he or she wants to establish remote command-line access on the server-side of a victim’s business network. But what is a “shell?” And why is it considered “reverse?” I will explore these questions in the following brief discussion on the topic.

Nmap is an extremely powerful, free and open-source network mapping utility that can be used for many purposes. In this post, I provide a brief overview of what Nmap can be used for in the cybersecurity industry. These various and useful functions include determining what hosts exist on a network, what services those hosts may offer, and what operating systems (and OS versions) may be running on the backend. Nmap can also scan information about firewalls and potentially also how to evade them. All of this information is acquired across whichever devices respond in the scanned range of IP addresses.