Glossary
Netcat (nc)
The general-purpose TCP/UDP utility commonly used as the listener that catches a reverse shell, and sometimes as the payload itself.
Netcat (nc) reads and writes raw TCP/UDP connections. In reverse shell
work it is most often the listener that catches an
incoming connection:
nc -lvnp 443
It can also be the payload, though the widely-deployed
OpenBSD build dropped the -e flag that would execute a shell, so a mkfifo
workaround or ncat is usually needed. Full detail in
netcat reverse shells and
choosing a listener.