Most Common Password Cracking Methods

There are number of methods out their used by hackers to hack your
account or get your personal
information.
Today in this post i will share with
you guys 6 Most commonly used
method to crack password and their
counter measures.
You must check out this article to be
safe and to prevent your online
accounts from hacking.
1. BruteForce Attack
brute force attack
Any password can be cracked using
Brute-force attack. Brute-force
attacks try every possible
combinations of numbers, letters and
special characters until the right
password is match. Brute-force
attacks can take very long time
depending upon the complexity of the
password. The cracking time is
determined by the speed of computer
and complexity of the password.
Counter measure: Use long and
complex passwords. Try to use
combination of upper and lowercase
letters along with numbers. Brute-
force attack will take hundreds or
even thousands of years to crack
such complex and long passwords.
Example: Passwords like "iloveu" or
"password" can be cracked easily
whereas computer will take years to
crack passwords like "aN34lL00"
2. Social Engineering
Social engineering is process of
manipulating someone to trust you
and get information from them. For
example, if the hacker was trying to
get the password of a co-workers or
friends computer, he could call him
pretending to be from the IT
department and simply ask for his
login details. Sometime hackers call
the victim pretending to be from bank
and ask for their credit cards details.
Social Engineering can be used to get
someone password, to get bank
credentials or any personal
information.
Countermeasure:If someone tries to
get your personal or bank details ask
them few questions. Make sure the
person calling you is legit. Never ever
give your credit card details on
phone.
3. Rats And Keyloggers
keylogger
In keylogging or RATing the hacker
sends keylogger or rat to the victim.
This allows hacker to monitor every
thing victim do on his computer.
Every keystroke is logged including
passwords. Moreever hacker can even
control the victims computer.
Countermeasure:Never login to your
bank account from cyber cafe or
someone else computer. If its
important use on-screen or virtual
keyboard while tying the login. Use
latest anti-virus software and keep
them updated. Check out below
article to know more about Rats and
Keyloggers.
4. Phishing
phishing hacking
Phishing is the most easiest and
popular hacking method used by
hackers to get someone account
details. In Phishing attack hacker
send fake page of real website like
facebook, gmail to victim. When
someone login through that fake page
his details is send to the hacker. This
fake pages can be easily created and
hosted on free web-hosting sites.
Countermeasure:phishing attacks are
very easy to avoid. The url of this
phishing pages are different from the
real one. For example URL of phishing
page of facebook might look like
facbbook.com (As you can see There
are two "b"). Always make sure that
websites url is correct. Check out
below article to know more about
phishing.
5. Rainbow Table
A Rainbow table is a huge pre-
computed list of hashes for every
possible combination of characters. A
password hash is a password that
has gone through a mathematical
algorithm such as md5 and is
transformed into something which is
not recognizable. A hash is a one way
encryption so once a password is
hashed there is no way to get the
original string from the hashed string.
A very commonly used hashing
algorithm to store passwords in
website databases is MD5. It is
almost similar to dictionary attack,
the only difference is, in rainbow
tables attack hashed characters are
used as passwords whereas in
dictionary attack normal characters
are used as passwords.
Example: ‘hello’ in md5 is
5d41402abc4b2a76b9719d911017c592
and zero length string ("") is
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
Countermeasure:Make sure you
choose password that is long and
complex. Creating tables for long and
complex password takes a very long
time and a lot of resources
6. Guessing password guessing
This seems silly but this can easily
help you to get someones password
within seconds. If hacker knows you,
he can use information he knows
about you to guess your password.
Hacker can also use combination of
Social Engineering and Guessing to
acquire your password.
Countermeasure:Don't use your name,
surname, phone number or birthdate
as your password. Try to avoid
creating password that relates to you.
Create complex and long password
with combination of letters and
numbers.