Hi and welcome. Today we’re going to see how to login into a Cisco router by cracking login and password. This method should only be used when we don’t have physical access to the device or the password recovery service has been disabled. Never, ever, ever use this to log in to devices not owned by you.

We will use a software piece that has been there for a long time and is still usable. We’re talking about “Brutus-AET2”. Here we have a nice screenshot.

Brutus

As we can see, this software has many configurable options. We can select many protocols to crack, if we want to use dictionary files or bruteforce, connection timeouts and sequences expected by the protocol. Following we have a video recording showing the process to get login and password from a Cisco router. [note that the video has been cropped to make it shorter]

We have to say that avoiding this kind of attacks is very very easy. We only need to use the Cisco IOS Login Enhancements feature to beat the attacker. More information on this feature at: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/sec_user_services/configuration/guide/sec_login_enhance_ps6922_TSD_Products_Configuration_Guide_Chapter.html

Brutus-AET2 can be downloaded in this blog downloads page or at http://www.hoobie.net/brutus/brutus-download.html

09/2019 - Video uploaded to Youtube