If you don’t know, Brutus Password Cracker is one of the fastest, most flexible remote password crackers you can get your hands on – it’s also free to download Brutus. It is available for Windows 9x, NT and 2000, there is no UN*X version available although it is a possibility at some point in the future.

Brutus was first made publicly available in October 1998 and since that time there have been at least 70,000 downloads and over 1.6 Million visitors to this page. Development continues so new releases will be available in the near future.

What is Brutus Password Cracker For?

In cryptanalysis and computer security, password cracking is the process of recovering passwords from data that have been stored in or transmitted by a computer system. A common approach (brute-force attack) is to try guesses repeatedly for the password and check them against an available cryptographic hash of the password.

Read more here.

Brutus was written originally to help me check routers etc. for default and common passwords.

Features

Brutus version AET2 is the current release and includes the following authentication types:

• HTTP (Basic Authentication)
• HTTP (HTML Form/CGI)
• POP3
• FTP
• SMB
• Telnet

Other types such as IMAP, NNTP, NetBus etc are freely downloadable from this site and simply imported into your copy of Brutus. You can create your own types or use other peoples.

The current brutus password release includes the following functionality :

• Multi-stage authentication engine
• 60 simultaneous target connections
• No username, single username and multiple username modes
• Password list, combo (user/password) list and configurable brute force modes
• Highly customisable authentication sequences
• Load and resume position
• Import and Export custom authentication types as BAD files seamlessly
• SOCKS proxy support for all authentication types
• User and password list generation and manipulation functionality
• HTML Form interpretation for HTML Form/CGI authentication types
• Error handling and recovery capability inc. resume after crash/failure.

There are other options to check out too such as: