What Is A Brute Force Attack?

Cyber Security
#1

In the world of Cyber crimes, brute force attack is an activity which involves repetitive successive attempts of trying various password combinations to break into any website. This attempt is carried out vigorously by the hackers who also make use of bots they have installed maliciously in other computers to boost the computing power required to run such type of attacks.

A Brute Force Attack is the simplest method to gain access to a site or server (or anything that is password protected). It tries various combinations of usernames and passwords again and again until it gets in. This repetitive action is like an army attacking a fort.

Now, you’ll think: “Wow that’s easy, I can do that too.”

You can try it out for sure!

Usually, every common ID (for e.g. “admin”) has a password. All you need to do is try to guess the password. Let’s say if it’s a 2-digit-pin, you have 10 numeric digits from 0 to 9. This means there are 100 possibilities. You can figure this out with pen and paper like Mr. Bean who tried to find correct last two digits of the phone number of the lost kid’s father in the movie, Mr. Bean’s Holiday.

But, the truth is that no password in the world consists of only 2 characters. Even, the pin numbers (a sort of password) used on mobile phones or in a bank consist of minimum 4 characters.

And, on the internet, 8 is generally the standard number for shortest length of a password. Furthermore, complexity is added as alphabets are added within a password to make it more secure. By the way, alphabets can be used in both UPPER and lower cases, thus making a password case sensitive.

Let’s say if we have an alphanumeric 8-character password, how many possible combinations could be made? There are 26 alphabets in English. Double them for both UPPER and lower cases and the count settles on 26+26 = 52.

Then we add the numeric digits: 52+10 = 62