Today I am going to show how to install Hydra on Linux. Hydra is a powerful penetration testing tool. It allows you to brute force almost anything. Please note that all of the tutorials here regarded on penetration testing and ethical hacking are only meant for testing and/or educational purposes. Do not harm anyone’s devices without their permission. Do not break the law.

All the credits from this tool goes to van Hauser / THC on GitHub.

You will learn how to install Hydra on Linux, Debian based systems, like Debian itself, Linux Mint and Ubuntu. I will be showing the command line tool installation process, along with the GUI. Kali Linux can enjoy the Hydra, because it is already installed. If you want to know how to install Kali on VMWare Player, check this out.

Number one of the biggest security holes are passwords, as every password security study shows. This tool is a proof of concept code, to give researchers and security consultants the possibility to show how easy it would be to gain unauthorized access from remote to a system. THIS TOOL IS FOR LEGAL PURPOSES ONLY! There are already several login hacker tools available, however none does either support more than one protocol to attack or support parallized connects.







How to install Hydra on Linux

If you are having problems during this installation, you should check out the GitHub page of Hydra. You might run into some issues if you use Mint or Ubuntu. My OS during the installation process is Debian 9 “Stretch”. I’m using sudo on every command that needs super user rights.

Install Hydra on Linux, from repositories

If you don’t mind about the version, or don’t need the features on the newest version. On Debian 9 you can install Hydra from the repositories.

sudo apt-get install hydra-gtk

This installs the command line version along with the front end GUI.

Don’t do this if you want faster and newer version with more features!

If you accidentally installed this, you can remove it with

sudo apt-get purge hydra-gtk && sudo apt-get autoremove && sudo apt-get autoclean

Install Hydra on Linux, from source, newest version

Now let’s get to compiling from source code 🙂

Fire up your terminal, and get everything up to date.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

After that, let’s install some things we need to install Hydra on Linux.

sudo apt-get -y install build-essential

sudo apt-get install git

On these ones, check the right ones for your distribution, or just remove the slashes and run them all, that way you should get everything installed correctly. Even if it says that something isn’t found.

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev libssh-dev libidn11-dev libpcre3-dev \ libgtk2.0-dev libmysqlclient-dev libpq-dev libsvn-dev \ firebird-dev libncp-dev







Okay, after doing those, clone it from GitHub. It shouldn’t take more than a few seconds depending on your internet connection.

git clone https://github.com/vanhauser-thc/thc-hydra.git

Now, go to the cloned folder with your terminal.

cd thc-hydra

Then configure it. No root privileges needed this time.

./configure

When the last line is now type "make" you know nothing went wrong, so let’s do it.

make

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament | What? | Okay when you see that text, you can do the following command. This one as root!

sudo make install

Okay, now it should be installed on to your entire system, so you don’t have to be in the folder to use it.

Type now cd to go to your home folder and then type in hydra -help to test it. If you get lines of instructions, it should be installed correctly.

In the next phase I’m going to show how to install Hydra on Linux with the graphical user interface.







Install Hydra-GTK on Linux

To do this, you will need to install the Hydra package correctly. Like we just did in the last phase.

You will also need GTK 2.0. You can install it from terminal.

sudo apt-get install gtk2.0

After waiting for this, go to back to your thc-hydra folder with terminal and the hydra-gtk folder inside it.

cd thc-hydra/hydra-gtk

Then do the same steps as we did before.

./configure

make

sudo make install

And now you should have the Hydra GUI also installed. Type xhydra in terminal to open it.

It should look like this.









Install Hydra on Linux, final words

Thanks for reading my tutorial! I hope it helped you 🙂 Be sure to follow us on social medias. Comment below if you need any help!

Something for you to read next:

Software alternatives for Linux & Windows – Open Source

Hack SSH Server with Nmap and Hydra – Pentest guide