Forum Thread: Why to Use Reverse Shell?

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.