Cybercriminals are stepping forward in committing crime each and every day. They find numerous ways to perform such malicious activities. So far, I have discussed many of them and in this blog, I am going to discuss the brute-force attack.
What does it mean?
It is referred to as a hit and try method or trial and error method where a hacker keeps on trying different passwords to break the privacy of any account until he becomes successful. This process may take several minutes, several hours, several days to several years. However, the success rate is pretty higher and depends upon the length of the password.
This attack is commonly called as brute force cracking or brute force.
The most common example of this attack is a dictionary attack where a criminal tries all the words of dictionary one by one and might get success in one of those million words. Apart from this method, he might try frequently used passwords or combinations of letters and words. Of course, it is time-consuming but success is a sure shot.
Now, what about its vice-versa?
Yeah…vice-versa!… i.e. Reverse brute-force attack. In this, the hacker tries a single password with so many user names to find the right match of the password. This kind of attack is common; when anyone knows the password but not the user name. Then, he keeps on matching multiple user names with the same password.
Are you aware of the tools that are utilized to carry out brute force?
If not, then here is the list various password cracking tools. Aircrack ng, John the ripper, Rainbow crack, Cain and Abel, LOpht crack, Oph crack, crack, Hashcat, SAMInside, DaveGrohl, Ncrack, and THC Hydra.
All these tools are very effective in breaking the password of any sort of account.
How brute-force can be used in a positive manner?
We discussed its negative side, however, it can also be used to provide security to your system by finding out the weak passwords that be flipped to stronger ones after that.
Ways to diminish its effects:
The effect of brute-force attack cannot be totally mitigated while can be made difficult for hackers to hack account by breaking the password.
- Always keep longer and complex passwords which demand more time to break.
- More use of special characters, lowercase, uppercase, and numbers may become difficult for criminals to identify.
- Limit the login attempts.
- Account lockout system if anyone makes multiple failed login attempts.
Hackers have enough time to break passwords. So it is up to us; how difficult passwords we create? The more is the complexity, the more time-consuming it will be.
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