What is a Dictionary attack? Brute force attack

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What is a Dictionary attack?

A dictionary attack is a type of brute force attack that involves an attacker attempting to gain access to a device or account by trying a huge number of passwords in the hope they eventually guess the correct one. This may sound ridiculous if you imagine a hacker sitting at a pc for hours on end trying to guess a password but this isn't how it usually works, lets have a look at how it does.

An attacker will often use a program or application that runs on the target device and tries all words in the dictionary with a combination of numbers and special characters until the correct one is found. The program or application the attacker runs on the target device greatly speeds up the process compared to them manually typing every password they can think of themselves.

So how can we protect ourselves from this?
The key here is password length and complexity. Looking at the table here we can see how long an average Dictionary attack program or application will take to crack a password based on length and complexity. The time it takes varies widly from 2 minutes for passwords such as "Password" to be cracked all the way up to 438 Trillion years for a password containing 18 characters, numbers, upper and lower case letters and symbols to be cracked.
Another method of protection from these attacks is for system administrators to set accounts to be locked out for 30 minutes after 3 wrong attempts, this greatly increases the time it takes for a program to crack even a fairly weak password.

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#bruteforce #hacker #cybersecurity