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 be used to tune your brute force password auditing.

  • To use different username and password lists, set the arguments userdb and passdb:
    $ nmap -p110 --script pop3-brute --script-args userdb=/var/usernames.txt,passdb=/var/passwords.txt <target>
    
  • To set a different timeout limit, use the argument unpwd.timelimit. To run it indefinitely, set it to 0:
    $ nmap -p110 --script pop3-brute --script-args unpwdb.timelimit=0 <target>
    $ nmap -p110 --script pop3-brute --script-args unpwdb.timelimit=60m <target>
    

Debugging NSE scripts

If something unexpected happens when you run any of the NSE scripts, turn on debugging to get additional information. Nmap uses the flag -d for debugging and you can set any integer between 0 and 9:

$ nmap -p80 --script http-google-email -d4 <target>

See also

  • The Discovering valid e-mail accounts using Google Search recipe
  • The Brute forcing SMTP passwords recipe
  • The Enumerating users in an SMTP server recipe
  • The Detecting backdoor SMTP servers recipe
  • The Brute forcing IMAP passwords recipe
  • The Retrieving the capabilities of an IMAP mail server recipe
  • The Brute forcing POP3 passwords recipe
  • The Retrieving the capabilities of a POP3 mail server recipe
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