Installing THC-Hydra6.1 on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) with SSL support

Wikipedia describes THC-Hydra as “… software … that uses a dictionary attack to test for weak or simple passwords on one or many remote hosts running a variety of different services.” Its useful for doing quick tests against your servers to make sure that your users are not using simple passwords. In pen tester speak, this is called a brute-force attack.
Here are the steps needed for installing it on the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat).
Make sure you have all the necessary development tools (i.e. libraries, compilers, headers) and the source files for GTK:

sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) libgtk2.0-dev libssl-dev cmake

Before we compile Hydra, we need to install libssh. For some odd reason, hydra does not like the libssh-dev package that comes with Ubuntu.

wget -c http://www.libssh.org/files/0.4/libssh-0.4.6.tar.gz
tar -xvzf libssh-0.4.6.tar.gz
cd libssh-0.4.6
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..
make
sudo make install
cd ../..

Download and extract the THC-Hydra tarball

wget -c http://edwincastillo.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/hydra-6.1-src.tar.gz
tar -xvzf hydra-6.1-src.tar.gz
cd hydra-6.1-src

Now you are ready to compile:

./configure
make
sudo make install

You are now ready to use Hydra. Type ./hydra -h to get syntax help. The GUI version can be started by running xhydra.
If you have a GMail account with IMAP enabled, you can use the following example to test hydra:

hydra -S -l email@gmail.com -p your_password -V imap.gmail.com imap