SpiderFoot: OSINT Reconnaissance Tool

Hydra is a parallelized login cracker which supports numerous protocols to attack. It is very fast and flexible, and new modules are easy to add.

This tool makes it possible for researchers and security consultants to show how easy it would be to gain unauthorized access to a system remotely.

xHydra is the graphical version of hydra, and it is easy to use. Hydra and xHydra come pre-installed in Kali Linux.

Hydra supports Cisco AAA, Cisco auth, Cisco enables, CVS, FTP, HTTP(S)-FORM-GET, HTTP(S)-FORM-POST, HTTP(S)-GET, HTTP(S)-HEAD, HTTP-Proxy, ICQ, IMAP, IRC, LDAP, MS-SQL, MySQL, NNTP, Oracle Listener, Oracle SID, PC-Anywhere, PC-NFS, POP3, PostgreSQL, RDP, Rexec, Rlogin, Rsh, SIP, SMB(NT), SMTP, SMTP Enum, SNMP v1+v2+v3, SOCKS5, SSH (v1 and v2), SSHKEY, Subversion, Teamspeak (TS2), Telnet, VMware-Auth, VNC and XMPP.

Hydra works in 4 modes:

• One username & one password
• User-list & One password
• One username & Password list
• User-list & Password list

We can check the options of hydra by using the following command in our Kali Linux terminal:

hydra -h

The screenshot of the command is the following:

We need a username of the list of usernames and a password or list of passwords to log in on web services. We can found the wordlist files in the /usr/share/wodlists directory of Kali Linux.
If we want to make custom wordlists then we can use crunch.
For a ftp login in our localhost we can use the following command:

hydra -l username -p password ftp://192.168.IP.add

The screenshot is following:

Here we have used flags -l and -p for single username and password but we also can use -L and -P for wordlists of username and password.

Then the command will be like following:

hydra -L /path/of/usernames.txt -P /path/of/pasword.txt ftp://192.168.1.1

In the way of cybersecurity after scanning with nmap if we find FTP port is open then we can try hydra to brute force the FTP login.

xHydra — Hydra with a graphical interface

There is a graphical version of hydra, it’s called xHydra. It is also comes pre-installed in our Kali Linux machine.

You can open xHydra from the Kali Linux terminal by using xhydra command:

xhydra

This command will open the xhydra as we can see in the following screenshot:

The above screenshot is xhydra’s target tab. Let’s know about all the tabs and it works.

• Target – Specify the target
• Passwords – Specify password options & wordlists
• Tuning – Specify how fast should hydra work. Other timing options also available.
• Specific – For testing on specific targets like a domain, https proxy etc.
• Start – Start and Stop the attack & shows the output.

In the following screenshot, we have selected a target and a protocol in the target tab.

Then in the passwords tab, we can enter a username or a username list and a password or a password list. Check the example in the following screenshot:

Then comes the tuning tab, we put 1 in the field of “no. of tasks”

Then we go to the “Start” tab and choose the start option on the bottom-left corner. The screenshot is following:

Then the process will be started. Whenever xHydra cracks the SSH we can see the username and password below, as shown in the following screenshot:

This is how we can brute-force online passwords using hydra and xHydra in Kali Linux. This is a very old and useful tool for penetration testers.

Feel free to leave a comment below or reach me on Instagram @iamshubhamkumar__.