Medusa: Open Source Software ‘Login Brute-Forcer’ for Password Auditing

“The only certain way for a hacker to find a correct password is
to try every possibility until he gets lucky — a process called
bruteforcing. A one-, two- or three-character password can be
bruteforced quite quickly, but as the password length increases,
the chances of successfully bruteforcing a password become
vanishingly small. The time required to have a reasonable chance of
bruteforcing a 15-character password can be measured in billions of
years.

“Medusa is described as a “speedy, massively parallel, modular,
login brute-forcer” with modules available to support almost any
service that allows remote authentication using a password,
including: CVS, FTP, HTTP, IMAP, MS-SQL, MySQL, POP3, PostgreSQL,
SMTP-AUTH, Telnet and VNC. Medusa has been designed to run faster
than Hydra by using thread-based (rather than Hydra’s
process-based) parallel testing to attempt to log in to multiple
hosts or users concurrently.”

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