11 Brute-force Attack Tools for Penetration Test

For your company’s IT system, you need a piece of concrete proof to demonstrate that your online business is solid against various kinds of cyberattacks, especially brute-force attacks.

What Is a Brute-Force Attack?

A brute-force attack is one of the most dangerous cyberattacks that you may have no trick in confronting! A brute-force attack aims at the heart of your website or your device’s security, the login password, or encryption keys. It uses the continuous trial-and-error method to explore them decisively.

The ways of  brute-force attack are varied, mainly into:

• Hybrid brute-force attacks: Trying or submitting thousands of expected and dictionary words, or even random words.
• Reverse brute-force attacks: Trying to get the derivation key of the password using exhaustive research.

Regardless of whichever type of brute-force attack you may face, it’s best to ensure that your system is safe from all cases.

Top Brute-force Attack Tools in 2024

In this list, you’ll find some of the best brute-force attack tools that you can use for your pentest (penetration test). And, if you haven’t used one before or are unconvinced of its utility, you can scroll down to the end of the list, where I’ve discussed why penetration testing is an important aspect of your organization’s IT system and its security.

But first, let’s check out the brute-force attack tools that you can use.

Note: The following tools may generate many requests that you should do only against your application environment.

Gobuster

Gobuster is one of the most powerful and fast brute-force tools that doesn’t need a runtime. It uses a directory scanner programmed by Go language; it’s faster and more flexible than interpreted script.

Features

• Gobuster is known as well for its amazing support for concurrency, which enables it to handle multiple tasks and extensions, keeping its speed processing.
• A lightweight tool without Java GUI works only on the command line in many platforms.
• Built-in Help

Modes

• dir – the classic directory mode
• dns – DNS subdomain mode
• s3 – Enumerate open S3 buckets and look for existence and bucket listings
• vhost – virtual host mode

However, it suffers from one fault, poorness for recursive directory searching, which reduces its effectiveness for multiple levels directories.

Try Gobuster

BruteX

BruteX is a great all-in-one brute force shell-based and open-source tool for all your needs to reach the target.

• Open ports
• Usernames
• Passwords

Uses the power of submitting a huge number of possible passwords in systematic ways.

It includes many services that are gathered from some other tools such as Nmap, Hydra & DNS enum. This enables you to scan for open ports, start brute force FTP, SSH, and automatically determine the running service of the target server.

Also Read: Online Port Scanners to Find Opened Ports on Server and IP

Try BruteX

Dirsearch

Dirsearch is an advanced brute force tool based on a command line. It’s an AKA web path scanner and can brute force directories and files in web servers.

Dirsearch recently became a part of the official Kali Linux packages, but it also runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS. It’s written in Python to be easily compatible with existing projects and scripts.

It’s also much faster than the traditional DIRB tool and contains many more features.

• Proxy support
• Multithreading
• User-agent randomization
• Support for multiple extensions
• Scanner arena
• Request delaying

For recursive scanning, Dirsearch is the winner. It goes back through and crawls, seeking any additional directories. Alongside speed and simplicity, it’s from the best Brute-force rooms for every pentester.

Try Dirsearch

Callow

Callow is a user-friendly and customizable login brute-force tool written in Python 3. It’s designed to meet the newbies’ needs and circumstances.

It provides flexible user experiments for easy error handling, especially for beginners to understand and intuit easily.

Try Callow

SSB

Secure Shell Bruteforcer (SSB) is one of the fastest and simplest tools for brute-force SSH servers.

Using the secure shell of SSB gives you an appropriate interface, unlike the other tools that crack the password of an SSH server.

Try SSB

Thc-Hydra

Hydra is one of the most famous tools for login cracking used either on Linux or Windows/Cygwin. In addition, for Solaris, FreeBSD/OpenBSD, QNX (Blackberry 10), and macOS. It supports many protocols, such as AFP, HTTP-FORM-GET, HTTP-GET, HTTP-FORM-POST, HTTP-HEAD, HTTP-PROXY, and more.

Installed by default on Kali Linux, Hydra is designed with both command line and graphical versions. It can crack a single or list of usernames/passwords by the brute-forcing method.

Also, it’s parallelized, very fast, and a flexible tool that enables you to tent unauthorized access possibility to your system remotely.

Some other login hacker tools are used for the same function, but only Hydra supports many different protocols and parallelized connections.

Try Thc-Hydra

Burp Suite

Burp Suite Professional is an essential toolkit for web security testers, and it comes with fast and dependable features. Also, it can automate monotonous testing tasks. In addition, it’s designed by experts’ manual and semi-automated security testing features. Many experts use it in testing OWASP’s top ten vulnerabilities.

Burp offers many unique features, from increasing scan coverage to being able to customize it for the dark mode. It can test/scan feature-rich modern web applications, JavaScript, and test APIs.

It’s a tool designed really for testing services, not for hacking, such as many others. So, it records complex authentication sequences and writes reports for end-users’ direct use and sharing.

It also has the advantage of making out-of-band application security testing (OAST) that reaches many invisible vulnerabilities that others can’t. Furthermore, It’s the first to benefit from the use of PortSwigger Research, which puts you ahead of the curve.

Try Burp Suite

Patator

Patator is a brute-force tool for multi-purpose and flexible usage within a modular design. It appears in reflex frustration using some other tools and scripts of password-getting attacks. Patator selects a new approach to not repeating old mistakes.

Written in Python, Patator is a multi-threaded tool that wants to serve penetration testing in a more flexible and trusted way than its ancestors. It supports many modules, including the following.

• FTP
• SSH
• MySQL
• SMTP
• Telnet
• DNS
• SMB
• IMAP
• LDAP
• rlogin
• Zip files
• Java Keystore files

With so many modules being supported by this brute-force attack tool, it’s definitely worth a try.

Try Patator

Pydictor

Pydictor is another great dictionary-hacking tool. When it comes to long and password strength tests, it can astonish both novices and professionals. It’s a tool that attackers can’t dispense in their armory. Besides, it has a surplus of features that enable you to enjoy a strong performance under any testing situation.

• Permanent assistant: Enables you to create a general wordlist, a social engineering wordlist, a special wordlist using the web content, etc. In addition, it contains a filter to help focus your wordlist.
• Highly customized: You can customize the wordlist attributes to your needs by using filter by length, leet mode, and more features.
• Flexibility and compatibility: it’s able to parse the configuration file, with the ability to work smoothly either on Windows, Linux, or Mac.

Pydictor Dictionaries include the following:

• Numeric Dictionary
• Alphabet Dictionary
• Upper Case Alphabet Dictionary
• Numeric Coupled With Upper Case Alphabet
• Upper Case Coupled With Lower Case Alphabet
• Numeral Coupled With Lower Case Alphabet
• Combining Upper Case, Lower Case, and Numeral
• Adding Static Head
• Manipulating Dictionary Complexity Filter

As you can see, Pydictor is quite comprehensive and worth your consideration.

Try Pydictor

Ncrack

Ncrack is a kind of network cracking tool with high-speed performance. It’s designed for companies to help them test their networking devices for weak passwords. Many Security professionals recommend using Ncrack for auditing the security of system networks. It was released as a standalone tool or as a part of the Kali Linux.

By a modular approach and dynamic engine, Ncrack designed with a command-line can conform its behavior according to the network feedback. And, it can perform reliable wide auditing for many hosts at the same time.

The features of Ncrack are not limited to a flexible interface but secure full control of network operations for the user. That enables amazing sophisticated brute-forcing attacks, runtime interaction, and timing templates to facilitate the use, such as Nmap.

The supported protocols include SSH, RDP, FTP, Telnet, HTTP(S), WordPress, POP3(S), IMAP, CVS, SMB, VNC, SIP, Redis, PostgreSQL, MQTT, MySQL, MSSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, WinRM, OWA, and DICOM, which qualifies it for a wide range of industries.

Try Ncrack

Hashcat

Hashcat is a password recovery tool. It can work on Linux, OS X, and Windows and supports many Hashcat algorithms such as MD4, MD5, SHA-family, LM hashes, and Unix Crypt formats.

Hashcat has become well-known due to its optimizations partly depending on the software that the creator of Hashcat has discovered.

Hashcat has two variants:

• CPU-based password recovery tool
• GPU-based password recovery tool

The GPU tool can crack some hashcat-legacy in a shorter time than the CPU tool (MD5, SHA1, and others). But not every algorithm can be cracked quicker by GPUs. However, Hashcat has been described as the fastest password cracker in the world.

Try Hashcat

Now that you’ve taken a look at these penetration testing tools, let’s also understand why we need them in the first place.

Why We Need Penetration Testing Tools

The brute-force attackers use various tools to achieve this goal. You can use these brute-force attacking tools themselves for Penetration. This testing is also called “pentesting” or “pen testing”.

The penetration test is the practice of trying to hack your own IT systems using the same ways hackers do. This enables you to identify any security holes.

Conclusion

After this detailed show, you have a varied arsenal of tools to work with. Choose what suits you best for each situation and circumstances that you face. There is no reason to believe that there is no diversity in alternatives. In some cases, the simplest tools are the best, and in other cases, the opposite.

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