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Brute Force Attack

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1 Introduction The amount of information being processed and stored has grown significantly in recent years. This makes organisations a prime target in which they frequently fall victim to cybercrime, reasons being cybercriminals are often financially motivated. One of the main issues organisations face, users often create easy passwords to remember, which makes their credentials susceptible to various brute force attacks. Cybercriminals use elaborate tools and techniques to crack user credentials which may later be used to perform an attack to the systems on the network. Authentication attacks occur on a daily basis which affect victims and corporations all over the world. The effects of a breach could result in sensitive information being compromised or a significant financial loss. There are various reasons that are thought to be correlated to authentication attacks. Some examples include, users using weak or the same passwords across multiple websites, organisations not salting and storing passwords in plain text. This aim of this report shall investigate the current tools and techniques used to conduct brute force attacks over both standard and SSH connection as well as offline. A number of usernames and passwords that range …show more content…

However, the type of encryption the password adopts also played a role in how efficient the brute force was. For instance, MD5 took 1 second, in contrast, SHA512 took 6 times longer. This illustrates brute force methods which are reliant on dictionaries or rainbow tables may have positive and negative characteristics. The positive characteristic is dictionaries contain a considerable amount of passwords that have previously been tried and tested, however, the downside is simple passwords are often still left out. For example, dictionaries that do not contain words with special

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