Hydra was a software project developed by "The Hacker's Choice" (THC) that uses a dictionary attack to test for weak or simple passwords on one or many remote hosts running a variety of different services. It was designed as a proof-of-concept utility to demonstrate the ease of cracking poorly chosen passwords. It is licensed under version 2.0 of the GNU General Public License with the additional terms that the software may not be used for illegal purposes, and any commercial service or program that uses Hydra must give credit to THC. Hydra is now mainly used for Teamspeak password recovery.
The list of supported services includes: TELNET, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP-PROXY, SMB, SMBNT, MS-SQL, MYSQL, REXEC, RSH, RLOGIN, CVS, SNMP, SMTP-AUTH, SOCKS5, VNC, POP3, IMAP, NNTP, PCNFS, ICQ, SAP/R3, LDAP, PostgreSQL, Teamspeak, Cisco auth, Cisco enable, and Cisco AAA.
The 5.0 release of Hydra, released in November 2005, marked the 10th anniversary of the hacking group. The current release is version 5.4, released in May 2006.
To comply to German laws about providing hacking tools to the public, Hydra is no longer available, the official announcement says: Sat, Sep 1, 2007 12:25:00 - 0x12ca3902 Dear visitors, dear fans and supporters of THC. As a consequence of the new German law on 'hacking tools', THC (The Hacker's Choice) decided to re-structure its team and split into a German and Freeworld division. German members will not continue to develop and distribute THC releases and papers. Members outside Germany will continue in the spirit of THC on some servers outside Europe. We are sorry.