Netcat and cURL are tools that will help the tester prepare an attack for this scenario, as they can be used to establish a TCP connection, send payloads, and receive responses from the target web server. Netcat is a versatile tool that can create TCP or UDP connections and transfer data between hosts. cURL is a tool that can transfer data using various protocols, such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP, etc. The tester can use these tools to exploit the PHP script that executes shell commands with the value of the "item" variable.