Problem Writeup: What's a Netcat? - CTF 4

Category: General Skills

Description for Nice Netcat

“Using netcat (nc) is going to be pretty important. Can you connect to jupiter.challenges.picoctf.org at port 25103 to get the flag?”

Approach

This problem introduces us to the Linux tool netcat, a powerful tool for connecting to other computers, port scanning, and port listening.

Running netcat

We can open the manual page (i.e., the documentation page) for netcat by typing man nc in the terminal. The page that appears tells us about netcat and–most importantly–how to run a basic netcat command in this format: nc [destination] [port]. So for this problem, we run this command:

pimaker-picoctf@webshell:~$ nc jupiter.challenges.picoctf.org 25103
You're on your way to becoming the net cat master
picoCTF{nEtCat_Mast3ry_d0c64587}

That was easy!

Press CTRL + C to end the netcat connection.