Types of Password Attacks

To understand how to protect yourself from a password attack, you should become familiar with the most commonly used types of attacks. With that information, you can use password cracking tools and techniques to regularly audit your own organization's passwords and determine whether your defenses need bolstering. To that end, here's a primer of the ­­most widely used types of attacks.

Password Guessing
The most common type of attack is password guessing. Attackers can guess passwords locally or remotely using either a manual or automated approach. Password guessing isn't always as difficult as you'd expect. Most networks aren't configured to require long and complex passwords, and an attacker needs to find only one weak password to gain access to a network. Not all authentication protocols are equally effective against guessing attacks. For example, because LAN Manager authentication is case-insensitive, a password guessing attack against it doesn't need to consider whether letters in the password are uppercase or lowercase. . . .