Deprecation Notice: Ncrack was written as a "Google Summer of Code" Project in 2009. While it is useful for some purposes, it is not fully developed or currently maintained. The latest (Version 0.7) release was in 2019. Our main focus has shifted to the brute force scripts included as part of Nmap's Scripting Engine (NSE).

Ncrack: Lightning-fast credential testing

Ncrack is a high-speed network authentication cracking tool. It was built to help companies secure their networks by proactively testing all their hosts and networking devices for poor passwords. Security professionals also rely on Ncrack when auditing their clients. Ncrack was designed using a modular approach, a command-line syntax similar to Nmap and a dynamic engine that can adapt its behaviour based on network feedback. It allows for rapid, yet reliable large-scale auditing of multiple hosts.

Ncrack's features include a very flexible interface granting the user full control of network operations, allowing for very sophisticated bruteforcing attacks, timing templates for ease of use, runtime interaction similar to Nmap's and many more. Protocols supported include SSH, RDP, FTP, Telnet, HTTP(S), Wordpress, POP3(S), IMAP, CVS, SMB, VNC, SIP, Redis, PostgreSQL, MQTT, MySQL, MSSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, WinRM, OWA, and DICOM

Ncrack is released as a standalone tool and can be downloaded from the section below. Be sure to read the Ncrack man page to fully understand Ncrack usage. If you are a developer and want to write your own Ncrack modules, studying the Ncrack Developer's Guide would be the first step.

Downloading Ncrack

Ncrack is available for many different platforms, including Linux, *BSD, Windows and Mac OS X. There are already installers for Windows and Mac OS X and a universal source code tarball that can be compiled on every system. You can also download the latest version straight from the SVN repository. Older versions are available from the dist directory. For the more security-paranoid (smart) users, GPG detached signatures and SHA-1 hashes for each release are available in the sigs directory (verification is similar to the Nmap verification instructions).

Specific details and instructions are available for the source code distribution, Windows binaries, and Mac OS X binaries, and Current development source.

Source code distribution

The Ncrack tarball compiles under Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other UNIX platforms like *BSD. The standard procedure of compilation on most UNIX systems usually goes like this:

tar -xzf ncrack-0.7.tar.gz
cd ncrack-0.7
./configure
make
su root
make install

Ncrack release tarball: ncrack-0.7.tar.gz

Windows binaries

Ncrack has been ported to Windows and has been tested on Windows XP so far. Since this is an experimental version, please notify us for any problems or successful results on other platforms.

There is a ready-to-use Windows installer available, which makes the whole procedure of getting and deploying Ncrack, painless:

Ncrack release Windows installer: ncrack-0.7-setup.exe

Mac OS X binaries

Ncrack has been ported to Mac OS X and there is a disk image file containing an installer:

Ncrack release Mac OS X installer: ncrack-0.7.dmg

Current Development Version

The Ncrack Git repository is on Github so you can always get the latest development version by pulling from there.