Brute-forcing is a method that tries a combination of numbers, lowercase and uppercase letters, and special characters to crack a password. This can be performed using certain tools such as Brutus, THC Hydra, Medusa, Burp Suite intruder, and many other tools available online. Brute-force attempts can be made on numerous services running on the network that involve authentication, such as FTP, SSH, POP3, HTTP, Telnet, RDP, and many more.

Identifying POP3 password cracking

In the following example, we see a captured attempt to brute-force POP3.

In the preceding figure, we used a display filter (pop.request.command == PASS) to narrow down on the password attempts made to access the POP3 service and...