Original subtitles

Brute force attacks?

Well, first of all, what is it, a brute force attack is an attempt using trial and error to crack

a password and username, find the high, then you are an encryption key and so on.

It's probably not very clear.

So let's see a simple example from the non digital world.

We have this lock that has ten thousand maximum combinations.

This means that if we tried them one by one, we will eventually find the right key that unlocks it.

Imagine that this is your password.

That, of course, has many more possible combinations.

But instead of having two hands, we have quite some advanced computing power that can calculate possible

solutions at a very high rate.

This is a very simple example of how trial and error works and how to crack a lock.

But let's get back to our digital world and see what types of brute force attacks are out there.

We have six main categories.

The first one is a simple brute force attack.

This uses a systematic approach to guess that doesn't rely on outside logic.

Second, hybrid brute force attacks this start from the external logic to determine which person variation

may be most likely used to succeed and then continues with the simple approach to try many possible

variations.

Third, dictionary attacks.

This gives us usernames and passwords using a dictionary of possible strings or phrases.

Fourth rainbow table attacks, a rainbow table is a free computer table for reversing cryptographic

hash functions, it can be used to get the function up to a certain length consisting of a limited set

of characters.

Five reverse brute force attack, this uses a common password or collection of passwords against many

possible usernames, targets a network of users for which the attackers have previously obtained Data

six credential stuffing users previously well known password username Pear's, trying them against multiple

websites, exploit the fact that many users have the same username and password across different systems.

Now that you have an idea about what brute force is and what are the types of attacks.

Let's get back to some scenarios that you can apply as a home user.

We will see how you can secure your passwords and how you can protect against possible attacks.

How secure is a password?

This is the average computer time on which a password can be brute force.

And this is quite interesting because a simple password like admin can be roughly cracked in around

eight seconds.

But a complex password that has multiple types of characters can take up to some months or even centuries.

And now let's see, based on this, what are the best practices, we compiled a list of six recommendations

that we wanted to give you.

First, use a password manager.

This will actually help you for the other five items from our list.

We're going to live in the brute force document from the resources, a link with all the free and paid

password managers.

Second, use a minimum password length of twenty or more characters if permitted.

Third, include lowercase and uppercase, alphabetical characters, numbers and symbols if permitted.

Fourth, generate passwords randomly, one possible.

Here is also where the password manager can help since they can generate passwords based on different

options that you can select.

Fifth, avoid using the same password twice across multiple user accounts and or software systems.

As we saw earlier.

If a database is hack and your username and password combination is there, the hackers will try those

combinations on multiple platforms to see if they get a match.

Sixth, avoid character, repetition, keyboard patterns, dictionary words, letters or numbers sequences.

Avoid using information that the user's colleagues and or acquaintances might know to be associated

with the user, such as relatives but names, romantic links and biographical information.

And now that you have all this information, let's have a fun workshop, go to the link in the slide

and play with passwords to see how fast you can brute force them.

However, we don't recommend you using your real passwords.

Try to keep it safe.

And with this, we conclude our brute force lesson, we hope that we provided some interesting information

and please find the links discussed here in the brute force text file from the resource section.

Thank you.

And see you soon in our next chapter.