Hydra (software)

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Hydra is a software project developed by "The Hacker's Choice" (THC) that uses a dictionary attack to test for weak or simple passwords on one or many remote hosts running a variety of different services. It was designed as a proof-of-concept utility to demonstrate the ease of cracking poorly chosen passwords. It is licensed under version 2.0 of the GNU Public License with the additional terms that the software may not be used for illegal purposes, and any commercial service or program that uses Hydra must give credit to THC.

The list of supported services includes: TELNET, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP-PROXY, SMB, SMBNT, MS-SQL, MYSQL, REXEC, RSH, RLOGIN, CVS, SNMP, SMTP-AUTH, SOCKS5, VNC, POP3, IMAP, NNTP, PCNFS, ICQ, SAP/R3, LDAP, PostgreSQL, Teamspeak, Cisco auth, Cisco enable, and Cisco AAA.

The 5.0 release of Hydra, released in November 2005, marked the 10th anniversary of the software package. The current release is version 5.3, released in May 2006.