Why to Use Reverse Shell?

I know that reverse shell lets victim connects to us but i heard that people mostly use reverse shell ,why to use reverse shell while hacking the nework outside our local network as we have to do port forwarding?it only brings some extra work

1 Response

Mostly for two reasons:

A) Connectivity. We can port forward our router, but not the targets - meaning that if we're both behind NAT, as is likely, we have to use a reverse shell because it's the only way to interact with the target - as we can't contact any bind shells.

B) Stealth. Egress (outbound) filtering is less intense than ingress (inbound) filtering due to overuse of bind shells in the past. As a result, a backdoor with a reverse shell is analyzed less aggressively, and requires fewer privileges, than a comparable bind shell.

It is also important to note that port forwarding is NOT the only way an attacker can direct a reverse shell to their machine - services such as ngrok allow port forwarding without mucking in router settings (I use it religiously when I deal with WAN), or a directly-connected, public-IP server (such as an AWS or DigitalOcean server) can function as a Command-and-Control (C2) server, to which the attacker can connect to interact with any reverse shells it has accumulated. Both of these options also include, by their very nature, a (small) extra layer of stealth - as you invoke a proxy in either case - which is always nice.

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