What is Brute Force Attack?

What is Brute Force Attack?

Brute Force Attack -

A brute force attack is a Hit-and-Trail method used to obtain information such as a user password or personal identification number (PIN). In a brute force attack, automatic softwares are used to generate the possible number of passwords and then those passwords are used one by one to open a file which is PASSWORD or PIN protected . Brute force attacks may be used by criminals to crack encrypted data, or by security analysts to test an organization's network security.

We can crack the password of a Facebook or Instagram profile.In this attack First we make a dictionary of all the possibe passwords.We can either make it manually or with the softwares .

Dictionary attack is one of the example of the Brute Force Attack.In this type of attack a text file is made which contains the most common passwords and the combinations of letters and digits and then the file is loaded in the automated tools in order to try all the passwords.This attack is the time and resource consuming  attack  that's why success is usually based on the computing  power ad the number of combianations of passwords tried in the dictionary rather then the algorithms.

We can defend this attack by using more complex passwords and avoiding the commonly used passwords line YOURNAME123 , 12345678 etc. 

The two most popular tools to do bruteforce attack are -

1. John the Ripper
2. Rainbow Crack

John the Ripper

John the Ripper is one of the most popular tool that does not need any introduction. It has been a favorite choice for performing brute-force attack for long time It is mainly used to cracks the passwords of RAR and Zip files . This free password-cracking software which initially developed for the unix based operating systems. Later, developers released it for other platforms too. Now, it supports almost all the platforms including Unix,Linux, Windows, DOS, BeOS, and OpenVMS.

 You can use this to identify weak passwords or to crack passwords for breaking authentication.

It can automatically detect the type of hashing that is used in a password. Therefore, you can also run it against various encrypted password storage. However, you can also use it with a dictionary of passwords to perform dictionary attacks.

Rainbow Crack

Rainbow Crack is also one of the popular brute-forcing tool used for password cracking. It generates tabels named as rainbow tables for using while performing the attack. In this way, it is different from the other brute-forcing tools. Rainbow tables helps in reducing the time in performing the attacks.

The good thing about rainbow crack is that there are various organizations, which already published the pre-computer rainbow tables for all Internet users. To save time, you can download those rainbow tables and use in your attacks.

This tool is still under development. It is available for both Windows and Linux and supports all latest versions of these platforms.

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