Knowledgebase: Password recovery
What is Brute-force attack ?
Posted by Andrey Malyshev on 08 July 2012 02:12 PM
In a brute force attack, the program tries to guess your password by trying every single combination of characters until your password is found. For example, the program might follow a sequence like this: "aaaaaaaa", "aaaaaaab", "aaaaaaac" etc until the password is found. Obviously, this method will take time, for an eight character lowercase alpha password there are 200 Billion combinations to be checked. But with modern computers this sort of attack doesn't take as long as you might think. The brute force attack is the slowest method of password attack, but can often be successful on short and simple passwords.
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