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Mohana Vamsi
Mohana Vamsi

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Hydra: Password Cracking with Ethical Purpose

Hydra is a form cracker which can be used to crack Web applications, ftp and telnet, pop3 and imap accounts that include positive results by ethical hackers on systems with weak passwords. The equities’ speed and flexibility make it the list’s favourite for spot vulnerability weak accounts.

Practical Example:
Suppose you’re to check whether an organization’s SSH server’s credentials are vulnerable. By means of Hydra, one can launch an unauthorized password cracking on approved systems.

Gather potential usernames and passwords into text files (users.txt and pass.txt).

Run the following command:

hydra -L users.txt -P passwords.txt ssh://192.168.1.10  
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Hydra doesn’t work randomly but it tries all possible combinations of a username with passwords of the server with great systematic.
Output: If it detects a working credential like admin:password123 then you can show your audience the dangers of using such phrases as passwords.

Hydra has the capability to handle lots of protocols such as FTP, HTTP, and even MySQL and hence will be appropriate for various systems. The insights assist organizations rise the bar and regain control over lax password policies and use of two-factor authentication.

Tip: Use Hydra ethically. It’s useful, but if used inappropriately it could result to legal ramifications. Testing should only be done after getting permission to do so.

Lesson: As for the brute force attacks, the users need to be informed about the complexity of passwords and need to update passwords more often.

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