Brute forcing POP3 passwords

E-mail accounts store sensitive information. Penetration testers auditing mail servers must test for weak passwords that could help attackers compromise important accounts.

This recipe shows you how to perform brute force password auditing against POP3 mail servers by using Nmap.

How to do it...

To launch a dictionary attack against POP3 by using Nmap, enter the following command:

$ nmap -p110 --script pop3-brute <target>

Any valid accounts will be listed under the script output section:

PORT    STATE SERVICE
110/tcp open  pop3
| pop3-brute: webmaster : abc123
|_acc1 : password

How it works...

pop3-brute was submitted by Philip Pickering and it performs brute force password auditing against POP3 mail servers. By default, it uses the wordlists /nselib/data/usernames.lst and /nselib/data/passwords.lst as username and password combinations.

There's more...

The script pop3-brute depends on the NSE library unpwdb. This library has several script arguments that can...