What does Brutus do?
In simple terms, Brutus is an online or remote password cracker. More specifically it is a remote interactive authentication agent.

Brutus is used to recover valid access tokens (usually a username and password) for a given target system. Examples of a supported

target system might be an FTP server, a password protected web page, a router console a POP3 server etc. It is used primarily in

two contexts :

• To obtain the valid access tokens for a particular user on a particular target.
• To obtain any valid access tokens on a particular target where only target penetration is required.



What is a target?
Well that depends on you. As far as Brutus is concerned a target is a remote system and possibly a remote user on a remote system,

there is more. To engage any given target we require an attack method, generally we only perform one type of remote attack - that

is we attempt to positivley authenticate with the target by using a number of access token combinations. A target may provide no

available attack methods, it may provide one or it may provide several.

What is an attack method?
In the context of Brutus, it is a service provided by the target that allows a remote client to authenticate against the target

using client supplied credentials. For instance a UNIX server sat on a network somewhere may be offering Telnet and FTP services to

remote users. Both telnet and FTP require the remote user to authenticate themselves before access is granted. For both these

services the required credentials are usually a username and a password, therefore we have two available attack methods : FTP or

Telnet. Some target systems will provide no opportunity for attack (at least not a remote authentication attack), perhaps they

offer no remote services, perhaps they only offer anonymnous remote services (that require no authentication) or perhaps they offer

authenticated remote services but use mechanisms to prevent authentication attacks such as account lockout or one time passwords of

some sort.