Brute-force attacks

A brute-force attack is when all possible keys are checked against encrypted data until the right key is found. Brute-force attacks are extremely costly from a resource and time perspective because the attacker is exploiting vulnerabilities in the encryption by taking advantage of key length and simplicity of the key. A password is often based on dictionary words meaning the total space an attacker would have to test would be all words in a matching dictionary making the guessing scope significantly smaller than a password using random characters. Best practice to mitigate brute-force attacks is using long and complicated keys as well as timeouts after a number of attempts and other methods to add more security factors.

Hydra

Hydra is a tool developed by The Hacker's Choice (THC) that uses the brute-force attack method to test against a variety of different protocols. It is ideal for attacking e-mail systems because Hydra can target a specific IP and protocol such as the...