Advanced Attacks

In this section, we will be looking at advanced attacks, starting with types of password attacks.

Password Attacks

The two most common password attacks are dictionary attacks and brute-force attacks. Let's look at these in turn:

• Dictionary Attack: For a dictionary attack, we could start by using all of the words in the Oxford English Dictionary and use them to try and crack passwords, but misspelled names or passwords with special characters such as $ or % can't be cracked, as they don't appear in the dictionary.

  Which of the following passwords would a dictionary attack crack?

  a. elasticity

  b. el@ST1city

  c. fred123

  d. blueberry

  It would crack elasticity and blueberry, but el@ST1city features numbers and characters not in a dictionary. Therefore, it will fail. It wouldn't crack fred123 either as it contains numbers.

  Example: An IT administrator was searching a security log and found the following entries. This is a dictionary attack...