I assume when I say "Brute Force Attack" that we all know what I'm talking about.  Just in case -- let's pretend we have a lock, a pocket full of keys, and we try each key in the lock until we exhaust the collection of keys or we are able to open the lock.  Now let's say the lock is a login, the pocket full of keys, the wordlist, and the act of trying the keys is some sort of application to perform the task.

I'm not sure that helps or hurts so I'll move on to what we're attempting to do in our first example. 

I've setup a user on an Ubutnu server and that server has SSH access enabled.  Our victim user is:  bforce and the password is:  123456

The first tool we're going to use is Hydra.  

I have a pay account on Hack the Box and I feel like I should be using it more than I do.  When I'm not complaining about their CTF-style boxes, I do like some of the challenges.  The unfortunate part is that with the Active boxes, I don't normally write them up.  While I do hone my craft at the hacking part, I don't sharpen up my skills for documenting the process.  When I'm posting the write-ups here, I can miss a thing or two but I try not to do that because documentation is as important as the actual process of exploiting the system.  Something to think about if you're solving these problems for more than just your entertainment.

With Nibbles, there wasn't anything really all that new except for two things.  First, I got to work on yet another content management system.  Second, I learned something about hash cracking -- but I'll get to that in a minute.

Penetration testing, red teaming, hacking, being enthusiastic about information security, or whatever else you want to call it -- to some degree, it's an art form.  A significant portion of this type of work is non-linear and it requires a creative mind to piece together the puzzle.  While the example I'm about to give seems relatively straightforward, there are other aspects of hash cracking that require an artistic imagination and I've seen challenges where I was amazed by the creativity of both the challenger and the participant.  Today, we're keeping it simple but this is a real world situation.

While scanning a host, we uncover the following: