How Passwords Get Cracked: Dictionary and Brute Force
The main attack vectors for cracking passwords, what makes each effective, and how strong passwords defend against them.
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Tags: security, passwords, attacks
How Passwords Get Cracked: Dictionary, Brute Force, and Rainbow Tables When a website gets breached and the database leaks, your password is (hopefully) stored as a hash. But storing the hash doesn't mean it's safe — it means the attacker now has time to crack it offline, at whatever speed their hardware allows, with no lockouts and no alarms. Understanding how cracking works is the most direct way to understand why certain passwords fail and others don't. How Passwords End Up Being Cracked Password cracking happens in one of two scenarios: Online attack: The attacker tries passwords directly against a live login form. Rate limiting, CAPTCHAs, and account lockout make this slow — typically a few hundred tries per hour. Only the weakest passwords (top 1000 common passwords) are accessible…
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