case study

If I were sent to a deserted digital island and allowed to take only one networking utility — I would unhesitatingly choose Netcat.

The official documentation (man nc) dryly states: “a utility for reading from and writing to network connections using TCP or UDP.”
In practice it’s the Swiss army knife of the network engineer, replacing dozens of specialized programs.

The article uses examples for OpenBSD netcat — this is the one that ships by default in Ubuntu 20.04+, Debian 10+, Fedora, Arch, Alpine and most modern distributions.

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Do you have an application spread across hundreds of client devices? Or a fleet of IoT sensors sending telemetry? Sooner or later the question arises: “What’s actually happening over there?” And right after it — “How do I collect logs without bankrupting myself on Splunk or Datadog?”

If your clients can send HTTP requests, you already have ninety percent of the solution. HTTP(S) is a universal and firewall-friendly protocol. All we need is a listener (endpoint) that will accept these logs.

In a world where cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, protecting remote access to servers and network equipment is of paramount importance. Simply opening ports for SSH, RDP, or web interfaces makes them targets for constant scanning and brute-force attacks.

Today, we’ll explore a powerful yet lesser-known technique that significantly improves the security of your MikroTik (and not only): Port Knocking. It’s not just about “closing ports,” but a smart system that makes your services invisible to most scanners and bots.