What is Medusa?
Medusa is a speedy, massively parallel, modular, login brute-forcer for network services. Some of the key features of Medusa are:
- Thread-based parallel testing. Brute-force testing can be performed against multiple hosts, users or passwords concurrently.
- Flexible user input. Target information (host/user/password) can be specified in a variety of ways. For example, each item can be either a single entry or a file containing multiple entries. Additionally, a combination file format allows the user to refine their target listing.
- Modular design. Each service module exists as an independent .mod file. This means that no modifications are necessary to the core application in order to extend the supported list of services for brute-forcing.
It currently has modules for the following services:
- AFP
- CVS
- FTP
- HTTP
- IMAP
- MS-SQL
- MySQL
- NCP (NetWare)
- NNTP
- PcAnywhere
- POP3
- PostgreSQL
- rexec
- rlogin
- rsh
- SMB
- SMTP (AUTH/VRFY)
- SNMP
- SSHv2
- SVN
- Telnet
- VmAuthd
- VNC
It also includes a basic web form module and a generic wrapper module for external scripts.
While Medusa was designed to serve the same purpose as THC-Hydra, there are several significant differences – you can see a brief comparison here.
It’s been over a year since version 1.4 was released and there has been a bunch of changes. This release includes multiple bug fixes, several new modules and additional module functionality. The following is a quick rundown on some of the new features, if you wish to see a detailed ChangeLog it’s here.
- AFP – new module (still marked as unstable)
- HTTP – digest auth support
- IMAP – STARTTLS, NTLM support
- POP3 – STARTTLS, LOGIN, PLAIN, NTLM support
- SMBNT – LM, LMv2, NTLMv2 support
- SMTP – NTLM support
- TELNET – AS/400 (TN5250) support
- misc. core and module bug fixes
You can download Medusa v1.5 here:
Or read more here.
