The tactic of brute-forcing a login, i.e., trying many passwords very quickly until the correct one is discovered, can be easy for services like SSH or Telnet. For something like a website login page, we must identify different elements of the page first. Thanks to a Python tool for brute-forcing websites called Hatch, this process has been simplified to the point that even a beginner can try it.
How Brute-Force Attacks Work
Brute-force attacks take advantage of automation to try many more passwords than a human could, breaking into a system through trial and error. More targeted brute-force attacks use a list of common passwords to speed this up, called dictionary attacks, and using this technique to check for weak passwords is often the first attack a hacker will try against a system.
In a brute-forcing attack against a service like SSH, it can be done from the command line easily by tools like Sshtrix. In a single line in a terminal, it's easy to launch a dictionary attack against a discovered SSH server using the built-in password list, making services with bad passwords extremely likely to be broken in to.
The biggest downside to a dictionary attack is that if the password does not exist in the password list, the attack will fail. If the password used on a targeted is strong, brute-force attacks can quickly become too expensive in time and resources to use as we start having to try every possible combination of characters. Another downside is that many services now ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
