Ncrack
Ncrack is a high-speed network authentication cracking tool. It is designed to efficiently guess passwords or perform brute-force and dictionary attacks against various network protocols and services. Ncrack is particularly useful for testing the security of networked systems by identifying weak or easily guessable passwords.
Ncrack supports a wide range of network protocols and services, including SSH, RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol), FTP, Telnet, HTTP(S), VNC, SNMP, and more. Ncrack is highly parallelized, allowing it to make multiple connection attempts simultaneously. This speed and efficiency make it effective for large-scale password-cracking tasks.
Ncrack can also be used to perform user enumeration attacks, where it attempts to identify valid usernames on a target system before launching a password-cracking attack. Ncrack supports both dictionary-based attacks (using a list of known passwords) and brute-force attacks (trying every possible combination).
It can target authentication methods like password-based, public key, and keyboard-interactive authentication. Ncrack can be integrated with other security assessment tools and frameworks, such as Nmap and Metasploit, to enhance network penetration testing.
An example may be:
ncrack -p 22 --user admin -P password-file.txt target-host
-p 22: Specifies the target port (in this case, port 22 for SSH).--user admin: Specifies the username to attack (in this case, "admin").-P password-file.txt: Specifies a file containing a list of potential passwords to try.target-host: Specifies the target host or IP address.
Info
Ncrack will attempt to log in to the SSH service on the target host using the "admin" username and each password from the provided password file (password-file.txt). It will report back if it successfully finds the correct password or if the attack is unsuccessful.