5) Brute Force Attack When you think about sophisticated hack | Cybrary.it

5) Brute Force Attack
When you think about sophisticated hacks, you probably visualize scenes from movies like James Bond, Mission Impossible or Borne Identity. Well, brute force attacks are probably the closest you are going to get to a real word James Bond scene.

It’s a good thing that they are among the least used. Brute force attacks are difficult to pull off, time consulting and expensive. Hackers use tools like Aircrack-ng, John The Ripper, and DaveGrohl to attempt brute force attacks on credentials.

There are two types of attacks. The dictionary attack uses every word in the dictionary as the passwords. The tools mentioned above can run and test the entire dictionary in a matter of seconds. The other type involves using the hash of the plain-text password. The goal is to hash as many plain-text passwords as possible to find a match. Rainbow tables exist which list the hashes of common passphrases to speed up the process.