Password Cracking:FTP

In this article, we will learn how to gain control over our victim’s PC through FTP Port. There are various ways to do it and let take time and learn all those because different circumstances call for a different measure.

Table of Content

• Hydra
• X-Hydra
• Medusa
• Ncrack
• Patator
• Metasploit

Hydra

Hydra is often the tool of choice. It can perform rapid dictionary attacks against more than 50 protocols, including telnet, ftp, http, https, smb, several databases, and much more

Now, we need to choose a word list. As with any dictionary attack, the wordlist is key. Kali has numerous wordlists built right in.

Run the following command

1	hydra -L /root/Desktop/user.txt -P /root/Desktop/pass.txt 192.168.1.103 ftp

-L: denotes path for username list

-P:  denotes path for the password list

Once the commands are executed it will start applying the dictionary attack and so you will have the right username and password in no time. As you can observe that we had successfully grabbed the FTP username as pavan and password is toor.

xHydra

This is the graphical version to apply dictionary attack via FTP port to hack a system. For this method to work:

Open xHydra in your Kali And select Single Target option and there give the IP of your victim PC. And select FTP in the box against Protocol option and give the port number 21 against the port option.

Now, go to Passwords tab and select Username List and give the path of your text file, which contains usernames, in the box adjacent to it.

Then select Password List and give the path of your text file, which contains all the passwords, in the box adjacent to it.

After doing this, go to the Start tab and click on the Start button on the left.

Now, the process of dictionary attack will start. Thus, you will attain the username and password of your victim.

Ncrack

Ncrack is a high-speed network authentication cracking tool. It was built to help companies secure their networks by proactively testing all their hosts and networking devices for poor passwords. 

Run the following command

1	ncrack –v -U /root/Desktop/user.txt -P /root/Desktop/pass.txt 192.168.1.103:21

 Here

-U: denotes path for username list

-P:  denotes path for the password list

As you can observe that we had successfully grabbed the FTP username as pavan and password is toor.

Medusa

Medusa is intended to be a speedy, massively parallel, modular, login brute-forcer. It supports many protocols: AFP, CVS, FTP, HTTP, IMAP, rlogin, SSH, Subversion, and VNC to name a few

Run the following command

1	medusa -h 192.168.1.103 -U /root/Desktop/user.txt -P /root/Desktop/pass.txt -M ftp

 Here

-U: denotes path for username list

-P:  denotes path for the password list

As you can observe that we had successfully grabbed the FTP username as pavan and password is toor.

Patator

 Patator is a multi-purpose brute-forcer, with a modular design and a flexible usage. It is quite useful for making brute force attack on several ports such as FTP, HTTP, SMB and etc.

1	patator ftp_login host=192.168.1.103 user=FILE0 0=/root/Desktop/user.txt password=FILE1 1=/root/Desktop/pass.txt

From given below image you can observe that the process of dictionary attack starts and thus, you will attain the username and password of your victim.

Metasploit

This module will test FTP logins on a range of machines and report successful logins. If you have loaded a database plugin and connected to a database this module will record successful logins and hosts so you can track your access.

Open Kali terminal type msfconsole

Now type 

1 2 3 4 5 6

use auxiliary/scanner/ftp/ftp_login msf exploit (ftp_login)>set rhosts 192.168.1.103 msf exploit (ftp_login)>set user_file /root/Desktop/user.txt msf exploit (ftp_login)>set pass_file /root/Desktop/pass.txt msf exploit (ftp_login)>set stop_on_success true msf exploit (ftp_login)> exploit

 From given below image you can observe that we had successfully grabbed the FTP username and password.