Netcat for Windows. Netcat is a simple networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections using the TCP/IP protocol. It's a wonderful tool for debugging all kinds of network problems. It allows you to read and write data over a network socket just as simply as you can read data from stdin or write to stdout. Jan 11, 2018 Memorial of original.Hobbit.'s version 1.10 of netcat tool. Nc is a Swiss Army knife utility to write and read data across TCP and UDP network connections. 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, including port binding to accept incoming connections. The original Netcat was released by Hobbit in 1995, but it hasn't been maintained despite its popularity. Mar 22, 2018 Netcat is one of the most powerful and useful tool for testing and debugging the network and protocol connectivity.Though administrators use this tool for troubleshooting purposes, the attackers may use this for malicious intentions such as establishing a connectivity, transferring files, scanning ports etc.Netcat can act as in client-server mode as well. Netcat is not considered the best tool for this job, but it can be sufficient (a more advanced tool is nmap) nc -v -n -z -w 1 192.168.1.2 1-1000 The -n parameter here prevents DNS lookup, -z makes nc not receive any data from the server, and -w 1 makes the connection timeout after 1 second of inactivity.
I'm providing it here because I never seem to be able to find a working netcat download when I need it.Small update: netcat 1.12 - adds -c command-line option to send CRLF line endings instead of just CR (eg. to talk to Exchange SMTP)