Brute Force Attack Software

Brute Force Attack Software Download
Brute Force Attack Software For Android
Wifi Brute Force Attack Software
Brute Force Attack Software Online

While the growing complexity and sophistication of cyber attacks is a very real and dangerous threat to organizations, requiring advanced security defences, cyber attacks that use simple (and sometimes even outdated) methods still prove useful to attackers.

Some old and nearly forgotten types of cyber attacks are re-entering the cyber landscape. A recent report indicates a 400% increase in brute force attacks on remote desktop protocols (RDPs) following the worldwide increase in remote workers. And while brute force attacks are a familiar topic and the epitome of “old school”, they are still effective and popular with cyber criminals.

Many Windows Server machines are under constant attack. Network scanners and RDP brute-force tools work 24/7. Eventually they may find a password to access your server! Moreover, RDP brute-force attacks abuse server resources (CPU, RAM, Disk Space and Network Bandwidth). Take a look at your server's Security EventLog. Dictionary attacks are the most basic tool in brute force attacks. While not necessarily being brute force attacks in themselves, these are often used as an important component for password cracking. Some hackers run through unabridged dictionaries and augment words with special characters and numerals or use special dictionaries of words, but.

Download Brute Force Attack Software. Brute force evo v.2 1.0 Leaked Reports show how to secure copy of Brute Force EVO II.Insider will publish more reports so stay tuned.This is a publication on Rss just to make sure that the coast is clear. Brute force evo II PDF v.1.0 Insider writes Underground Secret PDF brute force evo II to Order through.

That’s why we’re taking a deep dive into this type of attack, one that’s making a big comeback. We’ll define, explore and share how to protect against brute force attacks—so you don’t have to fall victim to an attacker’s “simple solution”.

What are brute force attacks?

“Brute force attack” refers to a method used to obtain private information such as usernames, passwords, passphrases, and similar. By repeatedly submitting different combinations of credentials, attackers can ultimately guess them correctly, and gain access to the data those credentials protect. Brute force attacks are often referred to as “brute force cracking” as well, as they fundamentally use brute force—in this case, computational power—to try and crack something—in this case, the credentials that guard sensitive data (or any data valuable to attackers). Common targets for brute force attacks are cracking passwords and encryption keys as well as API keys and SSH logins.

To imagine this scenario outside of the cyber realm and in the real world, try picturing a brute force attack like a thief trying to break into a safe by attempting every possible combination of numbers. That just wouldn’t be effective if done manually, on the spot.

More often than not, attackers carry out brute force attacks using an automated tool, script or bot to run through every possible combination of information needed until they can guess the one that grants them access. For example, by using a list of commonly used credentials, and even real user credentials obtained through security breaches and data leaks from breaches on the dark web, bots can systematically attack the target and do the attackers’ work for them.

The success of a brute force attack is measured in the time it takes to successfully crack a password/credential, which can be anywhere from a few seconds to a few years. Modern computers and technology allow attackers to crack an 8-character alphanumeric password in a few hours, and weak encryption in a few months which isn’t that rare to see in cases of advanced persistent threats.

As password length increases, the time it takes to brute force it increases as well. The same goes for the encryption key: a key with 128-bit encryption will have 2¹²⁸ combinations and 256-bit encryption will have 2²⁵⁶ combinations. Even with current technology, that amount of combinations for 256-bit encryption would take attackers several years to guess them all.

How brute force attacks are used

While not the most sophisticated of cyber attacks, brute force attacks are both reliable and simple to perform, as all attackers have to do is to let their machines do the work. Given the frequent lack of protection and mitigation strategy on the target’s end, this often proves quite effective. But even the simplest of defences, such as a long and complex password, can make for a timely process and could deter attackers.

When targets employ such seemingly basic strategies for protection, they increase the difficulty with which attackers might succeed in gaining unauthorized access. In fact, the time it takes to brute force a system and gain access is a valuable metric that security teams can use to test their network and system security.

The goal of a brute force attack can be anything including the theft of personal information that can be used to access accounts and different resources, credential harvesting for sale to third parties or on the dark web, identity theft to commit fraud, misappropriation of goods, launching of further attacks, redirection of domains to websites containing malware, and much, much more.

Brute force attacks are usually part of a bigger cyber attack, serving as the first step when attempting to breach a system and gain unauthorized access to sensitive data. And when it comes to the cyber attack life cycle, brute force attacks are usually used in the initial reconnaissance phase—to carry out a cyber attack cyber criminals need entry points to their targets and brute force attacks are a perfect hands-off solution to obtain those entry points.

Attackers use automated brute force attacks and run them parallel while trying to crack credentials, and even after gaining access to a network they can run further brute force attacks to perform privilege escalation.

Types of brute force attacks

While brute force attacks boil down to inputting every possible combination of desired information until access is granted, there are different methods in which cybercriminals can carry out these attacks. We’ve already mentioned some common examples but there are others, both simple and advanced.

Dictionary attacks

The most basic, and somewhat outdated, type of brute force attack is the dictionary attack. Using this method, an attacker starts with assumptions of common passwords and builds a dictionary of possible passwords (some of the most popular and still widely used passwords are “password1234”, “123456” and “admin”). They then go through their dictionary and input each entry until hitting on the correct password. Dictionary attacks are often used against multiple targets, requiring a large number of attempts due to their simplicity and frequent lack of effectiveness against more advanced targets.

Credential stuffing

In credential stuffing, already breached and known username and password pairs are used in the attempt to gain access to multiple services, applications and sites. This type of attack exploits the fact that many users reuse passwords across different accounts.

Simple brute force attacks

Trying every possible combination must yield results at least once, right? That’s the logic in place here: a simple brute force attacks can use different methods, such as inputting all possible passwords one at a time and using a systematic approach to guess them, without any outside logic. This type of brute force attack is commonly used to gain access to local files, as there’s no limit to the number of attempts possible.

Hybrid brute force attacks

Hybrid brute force attacks can be seen as the combination of dictionary and simple brute force attacks. Starting with a predetermined list of passwords (such as in the dictionary attack), hybrid brute attacks use external logic to determine which password will be the most likely to succeed (instead of inputting every password). Password variations can include adding numbers or changing letter cases, providing more possibilities to enter.

Reverse brute force attacks

A reverse brute force attacks involves using a small number of common passwords and repeatedly testing them against multiple accounts. What’s “reverse’’ in this type of attack is the fact that it doesn’t try to guess a password, but rather uses generic passwords and brute forces the username. This type of brute force attack is usually used to carry out more targeted attacks against a particular network.

Rainbow table attacks

Rainbow table attacks differ from other types of brute force attacks as they don’t target passwords, but hash functions that are used to encrypt credentials. Once a user enters a password, it is converted to a hash value. Then, if the hash value of that password matches the stored hash value, the user is authenticated and can log in. Attackers have found a way to exploit this process—by using a precomputed dictionary of plaintext passwords and their hash values, or “rainbow table”, attackers can determine passwords by reversing the hashing function.

Well-known cases of brute force attacks

Brute force attacks are widespread and frequent; it’s safe to say that almost every organization, almost every individual even, has experienced at least one such attempt. However, there have been a few notable cases throughout the years, with targeted organizations suffering massive losses.

Here are a few well-known cases of brute force attacks:

GitHub

In 2013, GitHub was the victim of a successful brute force attack which compromised several of their accounts. Cybercriminals executed brute force login attempts from 40,000 unique IP addresses, in order to access several accounts using weak passwords. It remains unclear how many accounts were actually affected, and GitHub is taking steps to ban weak passwords in the aftermath of this brute force attack.

Firefox

In 2018, Firefox’s “master password” protection was discovered to be using a weak mechanism dependent on the deprecated SHA-1 hashing algorithm. The algorithm was meant to protect access to users’ stored passwords, but was easily cracked with a brute force attack. This bug remained unfixed for nine years, with Firefox finally deploying a fix in 2019 to resolve the issue.

Alibaba

In 2015, Alibaba’s popular e-commerce platform Taobao was affected by a large-scale brute force attack, with about 21 million accounts affected in the breach. A database containing 99 million usernames and passwords was used to brute force Taobao accounts; one in five of those attempts was successful due to the bad practice of users reusing passwords.

Northern Irish Parliament

2018 saw another notable brute force attack. In March, Stormont, the email service at the Northern Ireland Parliament, was hit with a brute force attack that allowed attackers access to the email accounts of several Parliament members.

How to spot a brute force attack

During the initial phases of a cyber attack, detecting brute force attacks as they happen, and before they’re successful, can mean the difference between suffering a hazardous data breach and getting out unscathed. There are key indicators of attack to watch out for that can tell you if your site is under a brute force attack, and most of them are concerned with monitoring login activity.

If your network administrators notice many repeated failed logins coming from the same IP address, the same IP address used to access multiple usernames, or different IP addresses attempting to access the same username, that can mean a brute force attack is taking place. Furthermore, an unusual pattern of failed login attempts, such as a sequential alphabetical or numerical pattern, multiple logins at odd hours or even a successful login event that was followed by the use of an untypical amount of bandwidth, can indicate not only that a brute force attack is occurring, but that attackers might have already breached the network and are exfiltrating data.

How to protect against brute force attacks

While brute force attacks might be simple and sometimes ineffective, it’s still a risk not to take them seriously. They rely on two very common and very bad cybersecurity habits—weak passwords and inefficient network administration. Fortunately, there are many easy-to-implement protection methods and techniques that will cost attackers more time and resources to carry out a successful brute force attack—making your organization a less attractive target.

Here are some of the best practices and protection measures against brute force attacks available:

Enforce strong password policies

A strong password policy, and strong passwords themselves, form the first line of defense in protecting confidential information. A password policy is a set of rules used to improve the security of a system by motivating users to create and maintain secure passwords and store them properly. The first part of this means using a strong password mandated for every account on a network. Criteria for strong passwords include:

At least 8 characters
Not containing any personal information, especially a real name, username or company name
Passwords must be different across all accounts
No repetition of previously used passwords
Avoiding the complete spelling of any words
No numbers following a numerical sequence (such as “1234…”)
A combination of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and special characters

Also critical to strong password policy is enforcing rules about how often passwords need to be changed, and notifying users when that time comes. A good password policy will also be communicated to all users and explored with security awareness training.

Use a password manager

With all of the criteria that goes into having secure and complex passwords in mind, and knowing that a strong password policy requires having all different passwords for all accounts, remembering and storing all of them can be a hassle. This is why using a password manager is a great way to enforce and maintain a secure password policy that will be easy to implement for all users on a network.

Not only are password managers useful for storing and automatically filling out complex passwords, they can also help create more secure passwords and provide notification regarding any unsafe credential practices. To learn more about some of the best solutions out there, refer to our list of top 5 secure password managers.

Use MFA

As even complex passwords don’t guarantee safety from brute force attacks, adding an additional layer of security to all of the accounts on your network is crucial. And for this purpose we have MFA, or multi-factor authentication.

Multi-factor authentication considers the use of two or more methods of authentication in order to access an account. Those authentication factors are: knowledge (something only the user knows, such as a password, username, the answer to a security question, etc.), possession (something a user possesses, such as a one-time SMS password or security token), inherence (something a user “is”, as in biometrics), and finally, location.

The use of MFA is often cited as the first and possibly most important step in creating barriers that will keep attackers from gaining unauthorized access to accounts. It’s absolutely crucial for protecting against brute force attacks; even if attackers can guess a user’s password, they’ll be faced with yet another layer of protection to break through.

Limit login attempts

As indicators of brute force attacks, login activity and attempts are among the clearest, and improving the monitoring and rules around login activity is an important protection method against brute force attacks. A surefire method of prevention is to lock out users from logging into their accounts after a set number of attempts, and unlocking them after a period of time or manually, by an administrator. Another method is to implement time delays between login attempts, as some brute force attacks are based on a large number of attempts in a short amount of time.

Implement CAPTCHA

The CAPTCHA system is commonly used on many websites and services, to verify whether a user is human and to stop active brute force attacks as they occur. Tools like these, with the most famous being reCAPTCHA, require users to complete a task that’s simple for a human, but not for a brute force tool. Such a task might be having to identify images containing a certain element, or a pattern of letters and numbers, in order to complete a successful login.

Summary

Never underestimate the power of a simple cyber attack method in the hands of malicious actors. When we see that even large organizations with advanced security defenses fall victim to seemingly simple brute force attacks, who’s to say that we won’t?

Fortunately, simple attacks like brute force attacks require simple solutions: basic and fundamental practices that maintain a strong general security posture go far in defending against these types of attacks.

Sara believes the human element is often at the core of all cybersecurity issues. It’s this perspective that brings a refreshing voice to the SecurityTrails team. Her ability to bridge cognitive/social motivators and how they impact the cybersecurity industry is always enlightening.

Get the best cybersec research, news, tools,
and interviews with industry leaders

Topics

Protect Yourself
Protect Your Server

Unlike hacks that focus on vulnerabilities in software, a Brute Force Attack aims at being the simplest kind of method to gain access to a site: it tries usernames and passwords, over and over again, until it gets in. Often deemed ‘inelegant’, they can be very successful when people use passwords like ‘123456’ and usernames like ‘admin.’

They are, in short, an attack on the weakest link in any website’s security… you.

Due to the nature of these attacks, you may find your server’s memory goes through the roof, causing performance problems. This is because the number of http requests (that is the number of times someone visits your site) is so high that servers run out of memory.

This sort of attack is not endemic to WordPress, it happens with every webapp out there, but WordPress is popular and thus a frequent target.

Protect Yourself Protect Yourself

A common attack point on WordPress is to hammer the wp-login.php file over and over until they get in or the server dies. You can do some things to protect yourself.

Don’t use the ‘admin’ username Don’t use the ‘admin’ username

The majority of attacks assume people are using the username ‘admin’ due to the fact that early versions of WordPress defaulted to this. If you are still using this username, make a new account, transfer all the posts to that account, and change ‘admin’ to a subscriber (or delete it entirely).

You can also use the plugin Change Username to change your username.

Good Passwords Good Passwords

The goal with your password is to make it hard for other people to guess and hard for a brute force attack to succeed. Many automatic password generators are available that can be used to create secure passwords.

WordPress also features a password strength meter which is shown when changing your password in WordPress. Use this when changing your password to ensure its strength is adequate.

You can use the Force Strong Password plugin to force users to set strong passwords.

Things to avoid when choosing a password:

Any permutation of your own real name, username, company name, or name of your website.
A word from a dictionary, in any language.
A short password.
Any numeric-only or alphabetic-only password (a mixture of both is best).

A strong password is necessary not just to protect your blog content. A hacker who gains access to your administrator account is able to install malicious scripts that can potentially compromise your entire server.

To further increase the strength of your password, you can enable Two Step Authentication to further protect your blog.

Plugins Plugins

There are many plugins available to limit the number of login attempts made on your site. Alternatively, there are also many plugins you can use to block people from accessing wp-admin altogether.

Protect Your Server Protect Your Server

If you decide to lock down wp-login.php or wp-admin, you may find you get a 404 or 401 error when accessing those pages. To avoid that, you will need to add the following to your .htaccess file.

You can have the 401 point to 401.html, but the point is to aim it at not WordPress.

For Nginx you can use the error_page directive but must supply an absolute url.

On IIS web servers you can use the httpErrors element in your web.config, set errorMode='custom':

Password Protect wp-login.php Password Protect wp-login.php

Password protecting your wp-login.php file (and wp-admin folder) can add an extra layer to your server. Because password protecting wp-admin can break any plugin that uses ajax on the front end, it’s usually sufficient to just protect wp-login.php.

To do this, you will need to create a .htpasswd file. Many hosts have tools to do this for you, but if you have to do it manually, you can use this htpasswd generator. Much like your .htaccess file (which is a file that is only an extension), .htpasswd will also have no prefix.

You can either put this file outside of your public web folder (i.e. not in /public_html/ or /domain.com/, depending on your host), or you can put it in the same folder, but you’ll want to do some extra security work in your .htaccess file if you do.

Speaking of which, once you’ve uploaded the .htpasswd file, you need to tell .htaccess where it’s at. Assuming you’ve put .htpasswd in your user’s home directory and your htpasswd username is mysecretuser, then you put this in your .htaccess:

The actual location of AuthUserFile depends on your server, and the ‘require user’ will change based on what username you pick.

If you are using Nginx you can password protect your wp-login.php file using the HttpAuthBasicModule. This block should be inside your server block.

The filename path is relative to directory of nginx configuration file nginx.conf

The file should be in the following format:

Unfortunately there is no easy way of configuring a password protected wp-login.php on Windows Server IIS. If you use a .htaccess processor like Helicon Ape, you can use the .htaccess example mentioned above. Otherwise you’d have to ask your hosting provider to set up Basic Authentication.

All passwords must be encoded by function crypt(3). You can use an online htpasswd generator to encrypt your password.

Limit Access to wp-login.php by IP Limit Access to wp-login.php by IP

If you are the only person who needs to login to your Admin area and you have a fixed IP address, you can deny wp-login.php (and thus the wp-admin/ folder) access to everyone but yourself via an .htaccess or web.config file. This is often referred to as an IP whitelist.

Note: Beware your ISP or computer may be changing your IP address frequently, this is called dynamic IP addressing, rather than fixed IP addressing. This could be used for a variety of reasons, such as saving money. If you suspect this to be the case, find out out how change your computer’s settings, or contact your ISP to obtain a fixed address, in order to use this procedure.

In all examples you have to replace 203.0.113.15 with your IP address. Your Internet Provider can help you to establish your IP address. Or you can use an online service such as What Is My IP.

Examples for multiple IP addresses are also provided. They’re ideal if you use more than one internet provider, if you have a small pool of IP addresses or when you have a couple of people that are allowed access to your site’s Dashboard.

Create a file in a plain text editor called .htaccess and add:

You can add more than one allowed IP address using:

Are you using Apache 2.4 and Apache module mod_authz_host? Then you have to use a slightly different syntax:

If you want to add more than one IP address, you can use:

For Nginx you can add a location block inside your server block that works the same as the Apache example above.

Note that the order of the deny/allow is of the utmost importance. You might be tempted to think that you can switch the access directives order and everything will work. In fact it doesn’t. Switching the order in the above example has the result of denying access to all addresses.

Brute Force Attack Software Download

Again, on IIS web servers you can use a web.config file to limit IP addresses that have access. It’s best to add this in an additional <location directive.

Deny Access to No Referrer Requests Deny Access to No Referrer Requests

Extended from Combatting Comment Spam, you can use this to prevent anyone who isn’t submitting the login form from accessing it:

Nginx – Deny Access to No Referrer Requests

Windows Server IIS – Deny access to no referrer requests:

Change example.com to your domain. If you’re using Multisite with mapped domains, you’ll want to change example.com to (example.com|example.net|example4.com) and so on. If you are using Jetpack comments, don’t forget to add jetpack.wordpress.com as referrer: (example.com|jetpack.wordpresscom)

ModSecurity ModSecurity

If you use ModSecurity, you can follow the advice from Frameloss – Stopping brute force logins against WordPress. This requires root level access to your server, and may need the assistance of your webhost.

Brute Force Attack Software For Android

If you’re using ModSecurity 2.7.3, you can add the rules into your .htaccess file instead.

Fail2Ban Fail2Ban

Fail2ban is a Python daemon that runs in the background. It checks the logfiles that are generated by Apache (or SSH for example), and on certain events can add a firewall rule. It uses a so called filter with a regular expression. If that regular expression happens for example 5 times in 5 minutes, it can block that IP address for 60 minutes (or any other set of numbers).

Installing and setting up Fail2ban requires root access.

Blocklists Blocklists

It appears that most brute force attacks are from hosts from Russia, Kazachstan and Ukraine. You can choose to block ip-addresses that originate from these countries. There are blocklists available on the internet that you can download. With some shell-scripting, you can then load blockrules with iptables.

You have to be aware that you are blocking legitimate users as well as attackers. Make sure you can support and explain that decision to your customers.

Besides blocklists per country, there are lists with ip-addresses of well-known spammers. You can also use these to block them with iptables. It’s good to update these lists regularly.

Wifi Brute Force Attack Software

Setting up of blocklists and iptables requires root access.

Cloud/Proxy Services Cloud/Proxy Services

Services like CloudFlare and Sucuri CloudProxy can also help mitigate these attacks by blocking the IPs before they reach your server.