The brute force attack is still one of the most popular password-cracking methods. Nevertheless, it is not just for password cracking. Brute force attacks can also be used to discover hidden pages and content in a web application. This attack is basically 'a hit and try' until you succeed. This attack sometimes takes longer, but its success rate is higher.
In this article, I will try to explain brute force attacks and popular tools used in different scenarios for performing brute force attacks to get desired results.
What is a brute force attack?
A brute force attack when an attacker uses a set of predefined values to attack a target and analyze the response until he succeeds. Success depends on the set of predefined values. If it is larger, it will take more time, but there is a better probability of success.
The most common and easiest to understand example of the brute force attack is the dictionary attack to crack passwords. In this, the attacker uses a password dictionary that contains millions of words that can be used as a password. The attacker tries these passwords one by one for authentication. If this dictionary contains the correct password, the attacker will succeed.
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In a traditional brute force attack, the attacker just tries the combination of letters and numbers to generate a password sequentially. However, this traditional technique will take longer when the password is long enough. These attacks can take several minutes to several hours or several years, depending on the system used and length of password.
To prevent password cracking from brute force attacks, one should always use long and complex passwords. This makes it hard for attackers to guess the password, and brute force attacks will take too much time. Account lockout is another way to prevent the attacker from performing brute force attacks on web applications. However, for offline software, things are not as easy to secure.
Similarly, for discovering hidden pages, the attacker tries to guess the name of the page, sends requests and sees the response. If the page does not exist, it will show a 404 response; on a success, the response will be 200. In this way, it can find hidden pages on any website.
Brute force is also used to crack the hash and guess a password from a given hash. In this, the hash is generated from random passwords and then this hash is matched with a target hash until the attacker finds the correct one. Therefore, the higher the type of encryption (64-bit, 128-bit or 256-bit encryption) used to encrypt the password, the longer it can take to break.
Reverse brute force attack
A reverse brute force attack is another term that is associated with password cracking. It takes a reverse approach in password cracking. In this, the attacker tries one password against multiple usernames. Imagine if you know a password but do not have any idea of the usernames. In this case, you can try the same password and guess the different usernames until you find the working combination.
Now, you know that a brute-forcing attack is mainly used for password cracking. You can use it in any software, any website or any protocol which does not block requests after a few invalid trials. In this post, I am going to add a few brute force password-cracking tools for different protocols. Cryptus mac os.
Popular tools for brute force attacks
Aircrack-ng
I am sure you already know about the Aircrack-ng tool. This is a popular brute force wifi password cracking tool available for free. I also mentioned this tool in our older post on most popular password-cracking tools. This tool comes with WEP/WPA/WPA2-PSK cracker and analysis tools to perform attacks on Wi-Fi 802.11. Aircrack-ng can be used for any NIC which supports raw monitoring mode.
It basically performs dictionary attacks against a wireless network to guess the password. As you already know, the success of the attack depends on the dictionary of passwords. The better and more effective the password dictionary is, the more likely it is that it will crack the password.
It is available for Windows and Linux platforms. It has also been ported to run on iOS and Android platforms. You can try it on given platforms to see how this tool can be used for brute force wifi password cracking.
Download Aircrack-ng here.
John the Ripper
John the Ripper is another awesome tool that does not need any introduction. It has been a favorite choice for performing brute force attacks for a long time. This free password-cracking software was initially developed for Unix systems. Later, developers released it for various other platforms. Now, it supports fifteen different platforms including Unix, Windows, DOS, BeOS and OpenVMS.
You can use this either to identify weak passwords or to crack passwords for breaking authentication.
This tool is very popular and combines various password-cracking features. It can automatically detect the type of hashing used in a password. Therefore, you can also run it against encrypted password storage.
Basically, it can perform brute force attacks with all possible passwords by combining text and numbers. However, you can also use it with a dictionary of passwords to perform dictionary attacks.
Download John the Ripper here.
Rainbow Crack
Rainbow Crack is also a popular brute-forcing tool used for password cracking. It generates rainbow tables for using while performing the attack. In this way, it is different from other conventional brute-forcing tools. Rainbow tables are pre-computed. It helps in reducing the time in performing the attack.
The good thing is that there are various organizations which have already published the pre-computer rainbow tables for all internet users. To save time, you can download those rainbow tables and use them in your attacks.
This tool is still in active development. It is available for both Windows and Linux and supports all latest versions of these platforms.
Download Rainbow Crack and read more about this tool here.
L0phtCrack
L0phtCrack is known for its ability to crack Windows passwords. It uses dictionary attacks, brute force attacks, hybrid attacks and rainbow tables. The most notable features of L0phtcrack are scheduling, hash extraction from 64-bit Windows versions, multiprocessor algorithms and network monitoring and decoding. If you want to crack the password of a Windows system, you can try this tool.
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Ophcrack
Ophcrack is another brute-forcing tool specially used for cracking Windows passwords. It cracks Windows passwords by using LM hashes through rainbow tables. It is a free and open-source tool.
In most cases, it can crack a Windows password in a few minutes. By default, Ophcrack comes with rainbow tables to crack passwords of less than 14 characters which contain only alphanumeric characters. Other rainbow tables are also available to download.
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Ophcrack is also available as LiveCD.
Download Ophcrack here.
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Hashcat
Hashcat claims to be the fastest CPU-based password cracking tool. It is free and comes for Linux, Windows and Mac OS platforms. Hashcat supports various hashing algorithms including LM Hashes, MD4, MD5, SHA-family, Unix Crypt formats, MySQL and Cisco PIX. It supports various attacks including brute force attacks, combinator attacks, dictionary attacks, fingerprint attacks, hybrid attacks, mask attacks, permutation attack, rule-based attacks, table-lookup attacks and toggle-case attacks.
Download Hashcat here.
DaveGrohl
DaveGrohl is a popular brute-forcing tool for Mac OS X. It supports all available versions of Mac OS X. This tool supports both dictionary attacks and incremental attacks. It also has a distributed mode that lets you perform attacks from multiple computers to attack on the same password hash.
This tool is now open-source and you can download the source code.
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Download DaveGrohl here.
Ncrack
Ncrack is also a popular password-cracking tool for cracking network authentications. It supports various protocols including RDP, SSH, HTTP(S), SMB, POP3(S), VNC, FTP and Telnet. It can perform different attacks including brute-forcing attacks. It supports various platforms including Linux, BSD, Windows and Mac OS X.
Download Ncrack here.
THC Hydra
THC Hydra is known for its ability to crack passwords of network authentications by performing brute force attacks. It performs dictionary attacks against more than 30 protocols including Telnet, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, SMB and more. It is available for various platforms including Linux, Windows/Cygwin, Solaris 11, FreeBSD 8.1, OpenBSD, OSX and QNX/Blackberry.
Download THC Hydra here.
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Conclusion
These are a few popular brute-forcing tools for password cracking. There are various other tools are also available which perform brute force on different kinds of authentication. If I just give an example of a few small tools, you will see most of the PDF-cracking and ZIP-cracking tools use the same brute force methods to perform attacks and crack passwords. There are many such tools available for free or paid.
Brute-forcing is the best password-cracking method. The success of the attack depends on various factors. However, factors that affect most are password length and combination of characters, letters and special characters. This is why when we talk about strong passwords, we usually suggest that users have long passwords with a combination of lower-case letters, capital letters, numbers and special characters. It does not make brute-forcing impossible but it does make it difficult. Therefore, it will take a longer time to reach to the password by brute-forcing.
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Download DaveGrohl here.
Ncrack
Ncrack is also a popular password-cracking tool for cracking network authentications. It supports various protocols including RDP, SSH, HTTP(S), SMB, POP3(S), VNC, FTP and Telnet. It can perform different attacks including brute-forcing attacks. It supports various platforms including Linux, BSD, Windows and Mac OS X.
Download Ncrack here.
THC Hydra
THC Hydra is known for its ability to crack passwords of network authentications by performing brute force attacks. It performs dictionary attacks against more than 30 protocols including Telnet, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, SMB and more. It is available for various platforms including Linux, Windows/Cygwin, Solaris 11, FreeBSD 8.1, OpenBSD, OSX and QNX/Blackberry.
Download THC Hydra here.
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Conclusion
These are a few popular brute-forcing tools for password cracking. There are various other tools are also available which perform brute force on different kinds of authentication. If I just give an example of a few small tools, you will see most of the PDF-cracking and ZIP-cracking tools use the same brute force methods to perform attacks and crack passwords. There are many such tools available for free or paid.
Brute-forcing is the best password-cracking method. The success of the attack depends on various factors. However, factors that affect most are password length and combination of characters, letters and special characters. This is why when we talk about strong passwords, we usually suggest that users have long passwords with a combination of lower-case letters, capital letters, numbers and special characters. It does not make brute-forcing impossible but it does make it difficult. Therefore, it will take a longer time to reach to the password by brute-forcing.
Almost all hash-cracking algorithms use the brute force to hit and try. This attack is best when you have offline access to data. In that case, it makes it easy to crack and takes less time.
Brute force password cracking is also very important in computer security. It is used to check the weak passwords used in the system, network or application.
The best way to prevent brute force attacks is to limit invalid logins. In this way, attacks can only hit and try passwords only for limited times. This is why web-based services start showing captchas if you hit the wrong passwords three times or they will block your IP address.
Apple has long enjoyed the reputation of making a computing platform that provides security protection that is superior to its peers—in a word, Microsoft. The emergence of a group of malicious software (malware) programs in recent months—collectively known as Flashback or Flashfake—that specifically target Macs and their OS X operating system now has Apple in the unfamiliar position of being on the defensive.
Written as a Trojan horse program, Flashback has infected hundreds of thousands of Macs to date, allowing cyber criminals to steal information from those computers and turn many of them into virtual zombies that can be manipulated to attack other computers. This is not the first time Apple has had to contend with a malware outbreak, but it is by far the largest and most public scar sullying the company's aura of invincibility.
Apple has been able to avoid such security problems in the past for a number of reasons. For nearly two decades, Microsoft's success has kept it in the crosshairs of cyber criminals by virtue of Windows's popularity and, at least early on, the company's inattentiveness to bolstering security as the operating system grew more complex. Beginning in 2003 Microsoft became infamous for 'Patch Tuesday,' a monthly release of security patches (sometimes dozens at a time) to fix problems in its operating system, along with Internet Explorer and other software. Apple was a relatively minor player in the PC market, attracting little attention from cyber criminals who could make more money exploiting Windows. The same year Microsoft introduced Patch Tuesday, Macs represented less than 1.5 percent of desktop computers and less than 3.5 percent of laptop computers worldwide.
Macs still represent only a small portion of the overall worldwide computer market, but their share has risen to roughly 7 percent in recent years and is expected to grow steadily. In the U.S., Apple last year owned more than 10 percent of the PC market, behind only HP and Dell, according to technology research firm Gartner. Mac users can expect more incidents like Flashback will follow.
'In the computer community we've been saying for five, six, seven years that Mac is not more immune to computer viruses than Windows PCs or even Linux boxes, ' says Nicolas Christin, associate director of Carnegie Mellon University's Information Networking Institute. 'The only reason Macs were not massively targeted is that they didn't have enough of a market share to make them interesting for a hacker to devote resources to try to compromise those machines. Now that they've acquired a fairly sizeable market share, it makes sense that the bad guys would focus some attention on the Mac platform.'
Popularity contest
Market share certainly plays a role, but in subtle ways, agrees Stefan Savage, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego. 'Clearly, if a platform is unpopular then there is really not much interest in focusing on it,' he adds. 'In this regard, a platform's security depends on its popularity and the level of effort versus reward—that is, what is the expected return on effort.'
For cyber attackers, the decision to write malware for a particular operating system is an investment requiring the development of new skills, the acquisition of new software programs, even the learning of new slang, Savage says. 'It's not something one does lightly,' he adds. 'Moreover, for malware there is an established ecosystem around Windows that really helps reinforce that platform's dominance [as a target], including malware-writing tools, markets to buy and sell malware, infrastructure to deploy malware and lots of open-source information on new exploitation techniques. It takes time to build that kind of community. Market share certainly drives such things, but there is quite a bit of inertia as well.'
Assessments of a computing platform's security can often be subjective, with the results often depending on a computer user's preference. There are, however, several areas where operating systems can be judged head to head, Savage says, adding that OS X has consistently been behind Windows in producing what have become standard security mechanisms. 'And I'm unaware of Apple putting the level of investment into security that Microsoft has.'
Of course, Microsoft's security woes in the past necessitated that the company invest heavily in security improvements. One of the company's more astute moves came in 2005 when it began hosting its BlueHat conferences at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Wash. At BlueHat Microsoft engineers meet face to face with members of the hacker community to discuss vulnerabilities in Windows.
What is the difference?
OS X suffers from the same security flaws as Windows, and can be exploited just as maliciously by cyber criminals, says Antti Tikkanen, director of security response at F-Secure Corp., a Helsinki-based provider of security research and antivirus software. 'From the pure operating system viewpoint, I don't think there is a big difference between recent versions of Windows—Windows 7, in particular—and OS X with regard to security,' he says.
Given that the amount of effort required to successfully break into a Windows PC or a Mac is roughly the same, it comes down to economics. Cyber attackers want to infect as many computers as possible without investing more money to buy new types of malware—which can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars—and without having to acquire new skills required to write malware for more than one platform, according to Tikkanen. Although malware that targets Windows PCs has existed on the black market for years, there is no real market for OS X malware or for tools designed to write OS X malware, he says, adding, 'This is what keeps the scale of attacks against OS X low: the current attackers need to build their own tools, and this limits the number of bad guys that will go after you.'
Java spills
Apple is making Java software patches as well as a Flashback-removal tool available on its Web site. Some security vendors have set up Web sites to test whether a Mac has been infected. Flashback found its way onto Macs by exploiting a flaw in Java, which translates certain Web applications into code that can executed by different operating systems, including OS X and Windows. Apple's patches, however, will work only for Macs running OS X Lion and Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Still, about 17 percent of Mac users—roughly 10 million people—are running older versions of OS X not eligible for any security updates. Those ineligible for a patch have been advised by a number of security experts to disable Java in their Web browsers, at least until they can update to Java's latest version.
Apple had known about the Java vulnerability since January, when Oracle Corp. (which owns the rights to Java after purchasing Java creator Sun Microsystems in 2009) issued a patch to correct the problem. Apple, however, does not use Oracle's patches and chose to write its own version, which it did not make available until April 12. Flashback did much of its damage during those three months.
Java has proved itself a security liability over the years, in part because most computer users do not regularly install the security patches required to keep the bad guys out of their computers, says Marcus Carey, security researcher for Rapid7, a Boston-based information-technology security services firm. The situation is worse for Mac users because they generally do not install antivirus software, which serves as another layer of protection, he adds.
Flashback's greatest legacy will likely be as a security wake-up call for Mac users. 'The attitude that Mac does not have malware is dated,' Tikkanen says. 'So Mac users should follow the same safety precautions as Windows users. My tip for both Mac and PC users would be to switch off Java if you don't need it, and remember to update the rest of your software.'
