What’s a Brute Force Attack?

Hybrid brute force attacks: these hackers blend outside means with their logical guesses to attempt a break-in. A hybrid attack usually mixes dictionary and brute force attacks. These attacks are used to figure out combo passwords that mix common words with random characters. A brute force attack example of this nature would include passwords such as NewYork1993 or Spike1234.

Reverse brute force attacks: just as the name implies, a reverse brute force attack reverses the attack strategy by starting with a known password. Then hackers search millions of usernames until they find a match. Many of these criminals start with leaked passwords that are available online from existing data breaches.

Credential stuffing: if a hacker has a username-password combo that works for one website, they’ll try it in tons of others as well. Since users have been known to reuse login info across many websites, they are the exclusive targets of an attack like this.

Tools Aid Brute Force Attempts:
Guessing a password for a particular user or site can take a long time, so hackers have developed tools to do the job faster.
Automated tools help with brute force attacks These use rapid-fire guessing that is built to create every possible password and attempt to use them. Brute force hacking software can find a single dictionary word password within one second.
Tools like these have workarounds programmed in them to:

1. 
   Work against many computer protocols (like FTP, MySQL, SMPT, and Telnet)
   2) Allow hackers to crack wireless modems.
   3) Identify weak passwords
   4) Decrypt passwords in encrypted storage.
   5) Translate words into leetspeak — “don’thackme” becomes “d0n7H4cKm3,” for example.
   6) Run all possible combinations of characters.
   7 Operate dictionary attacks.
   

Some tools scan pre-compute rainbow tables for the inputs and outputs of known hash functions. These “hash functions” are the algorithm-based encryption methods used to translate passwords into long, fixed-length series of letters and numerals. In other words, rainbow tables remove the hardest part of brute force attacking to speed up the process.