Progress Report 1 - Reverse Shell Project - Python Software Development

 Today I started working on the first part of my project. The reverse shell requires an online server with which it can communicate with. The online server has a static address and this solves the problem of dynamic addresses which would have been there if the victim's PC was communicating with our PC instead of an online server.

I have used Digital Ocean to create my online server. I chose the most basic plan and added $5 to my account credits. This is more than enough for my project as I won't be running this project for a really long period of time. 

After signing up for Digital Ocean's plan, I went ahead and created a droplet (server) and then chose the operating system for the server. I chose the Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS) x64 version. 

After this, I chose the region of my data center - New York. I just picked New York because it was within the U.S. and it's better to pick a region that's closer to the place from where most of your traffic comes. After this I added my hostname - "connection-python-softwaredev-proj".
 

Next, to add the public SSH keys to my server, I followed the instructions on Digital Ocean's community blog. The Secure Shell Protocol is a cryptographic network protocol that allows users to securely access a remote computer over an unsecured network. The SSH keys are a more secure way of accessing a server (rather than using the username and password every time) because they are not vulnerable to common brute-force password hacking attacks. I downloaded PuTTY which is an open source SSH and telnet client (I downloaded the 64 bit MSI (‘Windows Installer’)). Once I was done with the installation, I opened the puttygen.exe file which generated the public-private key pair for me. Once the keys had been generated, I went ahead and saved both the keys in my project folder.

I copied the public key to my server. After this, I clicked on the "create" button to create my droplet/server. Once the server had been created, I could see it's name with the server's static IP Address. I coped the server's IP address to my clipboard.

Then I opened the putty.exe file and went to the "connection >> ssh >> auth" tab, where I added my private key. Next, in the session's tab I pasted the server's IP address (port number will be 22). I saved this session as 'Software Dev Proj'. 

Then I clicked on open and it opened the command terminal window, I typed in my username as 'root' and then I successfully logged into my server! 

That's it for this week! Next week, I will be working on my server.py file and I will be creating a socket and then I will be binding the port and host together with the socket. See you next week!