How to stabilise netcat shells using Python

Published on 20 January, 2023

Netcat is easy to use and widely available on many systems, making it a perfect tool for remote shells. However, netcat shells are very unstable. You are always one Ctrl + C away from accidentally losing the connection to your target.

If the attacking computer and the target computer are both running Linux, you can use the following technique to stabilise your remote shell, giving you a more robust terminal experience.

Establish a reverse shell or a bind shell using netcat. I wrote about this in a previous post.
Check if Python is installed. You can do this by running python --version. You may need to use python, python2, or python3 depending how the system is set up.
Inside the remote shell, run python -c 'import pty;pty.spawn("/bin/bash")'. This spawns a more feature rich Bash shell.
Run export TERM=xterm to set the xterm terminal emulator.
Press Ctrl + Z to 'background' the netcat shell. This will return you to the terminal on the attacking computer.
Run stty raw -echo. This does two things: raw changes how your keyboard input is processed, allowing Ctrl + C, cursor key movements, TAB, autocomplete, etc. to be passed through to the netcat shell; and -echo disables the echo in your terminal as you type, making the netcat shell behave more like a normal terminal.
Run fg to return the netcat shell to the 'foreground'.

Once you are done with your netcat shell, and you return to the terminal on the attacking computer, you will need to run reset to undo the changes we made in step 6 (stty raw -echo).

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