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The average person isn’t going to be the victim of a complex multi-stage hacking attack.
Brute force attacks are a tried and tested method for cracking passwords and gaining unauthorized access to systems.
If it doesn’t sound particularly sophisticated, well, it’s not but it works well withweak passwords.
What is a brute force attack?
The principle is straightforward, but let’s look at an example.
A four-digit PIN has 10,000 possible combinations (from 0000 to 9999).
Brute force attacks are far from rare.
A four-digit passcode, as mentioned earlier, has a maximum of 10,000 unique combinations.
Each character can be a digit from 0 to 9, and there are four digits to enter.
Four to the power of ten, that’s 10,000.
If you tried one password a second, it’d only take about three hours.
For an 8-character password, the number of possible combinations would be 62^8, or over 218 trillion.
At one try a second, that’s millions of years.
As the search space grows larger, brute force attacks become more time-consuming and computationally expensive.
This is why strong passwords work.
Web-based brute force attacks are pretty slow because of these protections.
However, brute force attacks can also occur offline.
This makes offline brute force attacks more dangerous since they remove a critical layer of defense.
Credential stuffingCredential stuffinginvolves using already-known username and password pairs from previous data breaches.
The attacker doesn’t have to guess the credentials.
Dictionary attackAdictionary attackis a variation of brute force attacks where the hacker uses a precompiled list of potential passwords.
These lists often include the most common passwords or passwords leaked from previous breaches.
The hacker systematically tests each password in the list until they find the correct one.
Hybrid attackA hybrid attack combines elements of brute force and dictionary attacks.
For example, “password” could become “P@ssw0rd” or “Passw0rd1.”
Here are my top tips to give your accounts a security boost.
