Wget

Pictured: Wget syntax usage.

Wget is a command line utility for downloading things from the internet. It is very simple to use: you feed a URL to the wget command, and it downloads it. It can download pretty much anything that your web browser can, only faster and with less overhead. Because it runs in the terminal, you can also use it on remote machines to download things where there is no browser or GUI.

However, its simplicity belies its incredible versatility. As the Insurgency Wiki once said, it is “the /i/nsurgent's Swiss army knife”. It can do all sorts of things out of the box or with minor additional scripting, including but not limited to:

• Recursive downloads and unattended/background downloads.
• Save and resume interrupted downloads.
• Download huge images or files that would make your web browser crash.
• Download web pages for local archival or later viewing.
• Download whole web sites and automatically convert the links to work offline as well.
• Downloading through proxies.
• Forum flooding and DDOS attacks.
• It also can be run headless if you so desire.

Since it is a very old (and lightweight) package, it is usually installed by default on most modern *nix distros, or at the very least is available in their default package manager repos. Read the manual for more detailed information.

Basic usage is simple. Just run:

wget <target url here>

To use wget in combination with Tor or Privoxy in their default configurations, use:

wget -e "http_proxy = http://ip:port/" <target url here>

AnonOps has also devised several ways to deploy Wget offensively. Some of these methods are outlined below:

wget --limit-rate=1 <target url here>

Just restart sometimes. What this does is downloading the target at a very low speed, so the connection stays alive for a loooong time. There's a maximum number of connections that a site can take. Using this method you can effectively drain the bandwidth of many sites solo. It has been confirmed that this even works on a 28k line.

In PowerShell, wget is aliased to Invoke-WebRequest, which provides similar functionality.

There is also a Windows port of Wget as part of the GnuWin project.