Note:-This Article is only for education purpose
1. Dictionary attack“This uses a simple file
containing words that can, surprise surprise, be found in a dictionary.
In other words, if you will excuse the pun, this attack uses exactly the
kind of words that many people use as their password…”
2. Brute force attack“This method is similar to
the dictionary attack but with the added bonus, for the hacker, of being
able to detect non-dictionary words by working through all possible
alpha-numeric combinations from aaa1 to zzz10…”
3. Rainbow table attack“A rainbow table is a
list of pre-computed hashes – the numerical value of an encrypted
password, used by most systems today – and that’s the hashes of
allpossible password combinations for any given hashing algorithm mind.
The time it takes to crack a password using a rainbow table is reduced
to the time it takes to look it up in the list…”
4. Phishing“There’s an easy way to hack: ask the
user for his or her password. A phishing email leads the unsuspecting
reader to a faked online banking, payment or other site in order to
login and put rightsome terrible problem with their security…”
5. Social engineering“A favourite of the social
engineeris to telephone an office posing asan IT security tech guy and
simply ask for the network access password. You’d be amazed how often
this works…”
6. Malware“A key logger or screen scraper can be
installed by malware whichrecords everything you type or takes screen
shots during a login process, and then forwards a copy of this file to
hacker central…”
7. Offline cracking“Often the target in question
has been compromised via an hack ona third party, which then
providesaccess to the system servers and those all-important user
password hash files. The password cracker can then take as long as they
need to try and crack the code without alerting the target system or
individual user…”
8. Shoulder surfing“The service personnel
‘uniform’ provides a kind of free pass to wander around unhindered, and
make note of passwords being entered by genuine members of staff. It
also provides an excellent opportunity to eyeball all those post-it
notes stuck to the front of LCD screens with logins scribbled upon
them…”
9. Spidering“Savvy hackers have realised that
many corporate passwords are made up of words that are connected to the
business itself. Studying corporate literature, website sales material
and even the websites of competitors and listed customers can provide
the ammunition to build a custom word list to use in a brute force
attack…”
10. Guess“The password crackers best friend, of
course, is the predictability of the user. Unless a truly random
password has been created using software dedicated to the task, a user
generated ‘random’ password is unlikely to be anything of the sort…”
