Brute forcing passwords

Brute forcing may not be the most elegant of solutions, but it will automate what could be a potentially mundane task. Through the use of automation, you can get tasks completed much more quickly, or at least free yourself up to work on something else at the same time.

Getting ready

To be able to use this recipe, you will need a list of usernames that you wish to test and also a list of passwords. While this is not the true definition of brute forcing, it will lower the number of combinations that you will be testing.

Note

If you do not have a password list available, there are many available online, such as the top 10,000 most common passwords on GitHub here at https://github.com/neo/discourse_heroku/blob/master/lib/common_passwords/10k-common-passwords.txt.

How to do it…

The following code shows an example of how to implement this recipe:

#brute force passwords
import sys
import urllib
import urllib2

if len(sys.argv) !=3:
    print "usage: %s userlist passwordlist...