Exploitation and data extraction from a vulnerable RDS instance

We have now discovered an RDS instance whose MySQL service is listening publicly. We have also identified a set of valid usernames.

Our next step is to brute-force the login and the valid password for our admin user.

For this exercise, we will use Hydra to brute-force the MySQL service and find the password:

1. On your Kali instance, download a wordlist dictionary for the brute-force attack; I find rockyou.txt to be adequate. Then, issue the following command:

hydra -l admin -P rockyou.txt <RDS IP Address> mysql

2. Hydra will brute-force the service using the wordlist that has been provided, and will give you the valid password for this:

Once we have our valid set of credentials, it's time to connect to the MySQL service and create a new user for WordPress.

In order to compromise the WordPress installation...