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Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
, the net use command (a sub-command of the net command, has several network-related functions allowing configuration from the command-line
Command-line interface
A command-line interface is a mechanism for interacting with a computer operating system or software by typing commands to perform specific tasks...
.
Drive mapping
net use can control drive mapping: mounting ("mapping" in Microsoft terminology) drive shares in a network environment. This command makes use of the SMB
Server Message Block
In computer networking, Server Message Block , also known as Common Internet File System operates as an application-layer network protocol mainly used to provide shared access to files, printers, serial ports, and miscellaneous communications between nodes on a network. It also provides an...
NetBIOS is an acronym for Network Basic Input/Output System. It provides services related to the session layer of the OSI model allowing applications on separate computers to communicate over a local area network. As strictly an API, NetBIOS is not a networking protocol...
protocol on port 139 or 445. The basic Windows XP configuration enables this functionality by default. Thus users can connect to and disconnect from shared resources such as computers, printers and drives.
net use can display a list of network-connection information on shared resources.
Null session connections
net use also connects to the IPC$ (interprocess communication share). This is the so-called null session connection, which allows unauthenticated users.
The basic syntax for connecting anonymously is:
net use \\IP address\IPC$ "" /u:""
For example, typing at the command prompt:
net use \\192.168.1.101\IPC$ "" /u:""
attempts to connect to the share IPC$ of the network 192.168.1.101 as an anonymous user with blank password. If successfully connected to the target machine, a lot of information can be gathered such as shares, users, groups, registry keys and more. This would provide a hacker with a lot of information about a remote user.
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