Penelope

Penelope is a modern shell handler for penetration testers and CTF players. It provides a more capable alternative to basic netcat listeners, adding automatic PTY upgrades, session management, logging, file transfers and helper modules.

Session features:

• Auto-upgrade shell
• Real-time terminal resize
• Logging shell activity
• Download remote files/folders
• Upload local/HTTP files/folders
• In-memory local/HTTP script execution with real-time output downloading
• Local port forwarding
• Spawn shells on multiple tabs and/or hosts
• Auto-maintain N active shells per host (re-spawn on death)

Global features:

• Streamline interaction with the targets via modules
• Multiple sessions
• Multiple listeners
• Serve files/folders via HTTP (-s switch)
• Can be imported by python3 exploits and get shell on the same terminal
• Can work in conjunction with Metasploit exploits by disabling the default handler with set DisablePayloadHandler True
• Expose live sessions to an MCP client like Claude Code with the --mcp switch (local HTTP, token-authenticated), driving the same shells alongside you