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?
- elasticity
- el@ST1city
- fred123
- blueberry
It would crack elasticity and blueberry, but el@STcity features numbers and characters not in a dictionary, therefore, it will fail. It wouldn't crack fred123 either, as it ends in numbers.
- Brute Force Attack: A Brute Force attack runs through all of the different combinations of letters and characters and will eventually crack a given...
