Bruteforce

The bruteforce command is used to bruteforce authentication of a user locally. It will use the su command to iteratively try every password for a given user. This is very slow, but does technically work. If no wordlist is specified, the default location of rockyou.txt in Kali Linux is chosen. This may or may not exist for your system.

Warning

This command is very noisy in log files. Each failed authentication is normally logged by any modern linux distribution. Further, if account lockout is enabled, this will almost certainly lockout the targeted account!

Selecting a User

Individual users are selected with the --user argument. This argument can be passed multiple times to test multiple users in one go. To use the default dictionary to test the root and bob users, you would issue a command like:

bruteforce -u root -u bob

User names are automatically tab-completed at the pwncat prompt for your victim host.

Selecting a Wordlist

Word lists are specified with the --dictionary parameter. This parameter is a path to a file on your attacking host which contains a list of passwords to attempt for the selected users. If a correct password is found, it is stored in the databaase, and the search is aborted for that user. To select a custom database, you would issue a command like:

bruteforce -d /opt/my-favorite-repo/my-favorite-wordlist.txt -u root