Let's now dive straight into Sparta:

1. To get started, navigate to Applications | Information Gathering | sparta:

2. Once Sparta has started, we need to define our target. In the Hosts pane, select Click here to add host(s) to scope.  For our examples, we will be using an IP address of 172.16.69.128:

3. Once you click on the Add to scope button, the scans begin. First, Sparta will run a staged Nmap scan. The staged Nmap scan is a number of scans actually, which will determine open ports and running services:

4. As the scans progress, the services found will begin showing up in the Services window to the right of the Hosts pane. Additionally, it will do its best to identify specific software and versions where it can:

5. We can also see information about the services found by clicking on the Services pane. This would be more useful if we were scanning a network range and wanted to see what was found listed by service rather than host:

6. Upon discovery of certain services, Sparta will automatically deploy tools to gather further information. In the following screenshot, on discovering an FTP service running, Sparta launches Hydra in an effort to uncover passwords, as shown in the following screenshot: 

7. If a web service is discovered, it will run nikto. Additionally, it runs screenshooter to take a screenshot of the website found:

8. When we look at all the information Sparta has acquired and organized for us, it is quite impressive. It has found a number of services and discovered usernames and passwords for a great deal of them, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and FTP services. However, there is one FTP service it was not able to find credentials for; check out the following screenshot:

9. Given that no password was found, let's see whether we can find it using Sparta's Brute tab. If we click on that tab, we can configure the IP, Port, and Service:  

10. We will also use a Username list and Password list. We do this by clicking on the radio button and browsing to the lists we want to use. Kali has some great word lists in the /usr/share/wordlists directory.  We will use /usr/share/wordlists/unix_users.txt for the Username list and /usr/share/wordlists/unix_passwords.txt for the Passwords list:

11. Once we have it properly configured, we are presented with a dialog box; just click on the Run button and let it do the work. It finds the username/password combination in short order and displays it back to the screen: