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A friend told me that hackers can only hack with telnet if you have telnet server enabled. Is it so or are there are means of hacking with telnet?

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Short answer: no — a telnet server is only one of many possible entry points. , and made the right high-level points; here are clearer distinctions and practical steps you can apply.

Attack models to understand (brief)

  • Attacker-initiated connect: the attacker reaches a listening service on your machine (a traditional remote service).
  • Victim-initiated connect: code running on the target opens an outbound connection to an attacker (reverse shell), or a user is tricked into running something (phishing, malicious document, drive-by). An attacker can get a shell via exploited web apps, RDP/SMB flaws, unpatched daemons, or social engineering — not just by finding a telnet server.

Quick checks and immediate actions

# Linux: check for a telnet listener (port 23)
ss -ltnp | grep :23
# or
netstat -ltnp | grep :23

# Windows (Admin):
netstat -ano | findstr :23
sc query tlntsvr

If a telnet server is present, stop and disable the service and block port 23 at the host and perimeter. Package and service names vary by OS, so use the appropriate service manager or package tool for your system.

Practical hardening and detection

  • Replace telnet with SSH and prefer key-based auth; disable password/root logins.
  • Close unused ports, apply host and network firewall rules, and enforce egress filtering to limit outbound connections (helps prevent reverse shells).
  • Keep software patched, remove default/weak credentials, and deploy simple monitoring (log review, fail2ban, IDS/IPS).
  • If compromise is suspected, isolate the host, preserve logs and volatile data, and consider professional forensics instead of just rebooting.

Summary: telnet can be a risk, but it is not the only path. Reduce your overall attack surface, patch and monitor, and treat unexpected outgoing connections or new listening services as high-priority indicators.

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Member Avatar for extr3mex

Firstly, Telnet is kind of like a software which allows you to access any remote machine which has a telnet server enabled in it. To connect to that remote computer (in which the telnet server is enabled), you need to know the username and password which is given to you by the owner of that remote machine (or the Systems Administrator). So if you have the username and password you can connect to the remote telnet server.

If u meant if telnet logins can be hacked through the network. The answer is Yes! Telnet sends usernames and passwords without any sort of encrption through the network. So, if someone tries to login to the telnet server, you can sniff your network traffic(using tools like Wireshark) and get the username and passwords.

Member Avatar for JorgeM

It sounds like the person that gave you the information is not that familiar with network security. That person may be referring to telnet because of the fact that some of the hacks produce a remote command line type of console for the attacker to run commands on the target computer. That isn't telnet.

To hack a system, the system has to have an open port to allow other systems to connect to it. For a system that has no open port, the hack would need to be initiated from the target system, as in te case where someone may send you an email that had links for you to click, or the user visits a web site that has malicious code.

So in the example where there is an open port, say something common like 80 because web services are running, the attacker would send traffic to that port and the code would do something to crash, or insert code to make the target system do something like allow the attacker to take control.

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