I am currently attempting to broaden my education level on penetration testing and I am using the Metasploitable linux 2.0 and have tried with the De-Ice ISO as well. I have tried using Hydra to brute force the FTP service and the SSH service with a smaller modified version of the darkc0de.lst dictionary that comes with backtrack 5 R3 so my dictionary is only 15 MB. I start hydra with the following command line:
hydra -l root -P /root/desktop/darkc0de.lst -f -v -e nsr 192.168.1.4 ftp
This works and begins to brute force the FTP server but is only cracking 250 - 270 words per minute and says it will take 90 - 100 hours to complete. Thinking this may have to do with the allocated ram for the VMWare machine running metasploitable I took the ram up to 2 GBs for the VMware machine. This attempted fix yielded the same results. After attempting to add ram to the VMWare machine I read that changing the threads could help so I tried the following to commands:
hydra -l root -P /root/desktop/darkc0de.lst -f -v -t 5 -e nsr 192.168.1.4 ftp
hydra -l root -P /root/desktop/darkc0de.lst -f -v -t 0 -e nsr 192.168.1.4 ftp
Both of these commands as well yielded the same results. The computer I am using Kali on has a 2.6 GHz processor and I am running Kali GNOME i386 on a USB.
Any and all help will be greatly appreciated. It is very frustrating to attempt to learn something when it is taking days to exploit each section and I know this should be able to be done in a matter of hours. Thanks in advance for your help.