Hydra error every ~5 minutes (all childrens are dead)

[byteme]

Hey!

I am currently playing with the de-ice pentest disk 1.120 a. I am running hydra against ssh with the 50 user names I have and the darkc0de.lst password list.

The problem is hydra keeps crashing every 5-6 minutes, only saying "all childrens (sic) are dead".

Running BT5 from the hard drive on a netbook with an Atom processor and 1 GB RAM. De-ice is running on another computer with a dual-core Intel 2.53 GHz CPU with 4 GB RAM for the host as a VirtualBox machine with 1 GB RAM, connected in bridged mode.

I checked with free and top and the BT5 box has pretty low CPU usage (30-40%) and 160-220 MB free RAM at all times.

Any suggestions to prevent / troubleshoot the crashes?

I previously tried another disk (de-ice 1.110 or 1.100) with less tasks (-t 4) and a different protocol (ftp) to no avail.

I wrote the following wrapper script as /usr/local/bin/echidna which makes it restart automatically, but a more permanent solution would be appreciated.

#!/bin/bash

echo `date` Starting Hydra.
hydra $@ > /root/echidna.log #Overwrites the previous log

while [ $? -ne 0 ]
do
	echo `date` Error encountered, restarting Hydra.
	hydra -R >> /root/echidna.log
done

echo `date` Process complete.

Simply run "grep password /root/echidna.log" to see any found passwords.

[joeaverage]

I'm having the exact same issue with a similar setup. I'm running the de-ice on virtualbox as well, and I'm wondering if that is somehow related to the issue.

I'm going to run the disk on an actual physical system and see if that clears up the issue. I'll let you know how it goes!

*Update*

I tried running the De-Ice image directly on the computer but hydra still exhibited the same symptoms. Tuning the number of processes and timeout helped very little or not at all. I updated to Hydra 6.3 and then it started to perform much better and I was finally able to crack the password(s), though it would still occasionally die. I also had to fiddle with the tuning options and bump the number of processes down to 8ish.

I got 6.3 just by running apt-get install hydra. THC has 6.4 version of hydra on their website as well. Hopefully this helps!

FYI Also I found that trying to run hydra across wireless was a recipe for fail.

[herdrich]

I was also having the same problem while running the attack across wifi. I am using the gui xhydra but changed the # of task and timeout to 5 and 50 which eliminated the problem. Im sure i can up the tasks some more but im not too worried about the speed i just ran it before i went to bed and had the password in the morning.