Locking the Cookie Jar: How to Protect Against Embezzlement, Identity Theft, and Hackers by R. Scott Alvord

Author:R. Scott Alvord [Alvord, R. Scott]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: computer safety, embezzlement, hacker-proof passwords, scott alvord, online security, stop embezzlement, secure passwords, identity theft, online safety, cybersecurity, business hacking, cyber security, cyber crime, stop fraud, stolen identity, id theft, business security, fraud, stop hackers, computer hacking, monetary policy, hacking
ISBN: 9781942836513
Publisher: Advanced Publishing Concepts
Published: 2017-11-02T04:00:00+00:00

Brute Force Hacking Programs

If the hacker’s dictionary fails, the hacker may resort to the brute force method of programmatically-generated passwords. Given an infinite amount of time and computing power, ANY password could be discovered using this technique. Governments use this technique. In simple terms, it basically tries every possible combination of characters until it discovers the password.

The hacker starts by creating a character list containing all characters that could be used in a password. A basic character list would include all the characters you find on your keyboard. In 99.9% of all cases, this is enough to calculate the password as described below. For trickier passwords or international victims, the hacker can expand the character list to include hundreds or thousands of the many special characters you don’t normally see on the keyboard such as “£,” “Ѫ,” and “˨.” But again, it is extremely rare that a targeted victim would actually use characters not found on the keyboard.

To describe this in as simple an example as possible, let’s pretend that the entire alphabet consists of only the letters “abc” instead of the several hundreds or thousands of characters it really contains. Let’s also pretend that the hacker knows that the password size has to be exactly three characters. Again, this knowledge is just to make this example easier to follow. Let’s pretend that the unknown password is “bac” and the hacker is using “abc” character list to find it.

The brute force hacking program uses the character list (abc) and starts by trying “aaa” then “aab” then “aac” then “aba” and the rest looks like this: abb, abc, aca, acb, acc, baa, bab, and when it tries “bac” it discovers the match!

Of course, this requires a system that does not have a lockout feature if the correct password is not provided in a certain number of tries.

It is important to understand that working through every possible combination of characters in a large character list can be extremely time intensive for a person, but this is what computers excel at. However, even super computers get bogged down when they attempt to perform a brute force hack on a long password.

For example, if the character list only contains numerals (0-9), then a 1-digit password has 10 possible combinations. A 2-digit password has 100 possible combinations (00 through 99). A 3-digit password has 1000 possible combinations (000 through 999). A 5-digit password would have 100,000 combinations, and a 6-digit password would have 1,000,000 combinations. If you jump to a 10-digit password, it results in 10,000,000,000 (ten billion) combinations. At this level, it can take a computer quite a bit of time to calculate every possible combination.

Now let’s see what happens if we increase our character list to contain every possible keyboard character, which is 95 characters for most keyboards. If the password is just one character long, then there are obviously 95 possible answers. If the password is two characters long, then there are 9,025 possible combinations. If the password is five characters long, then the possible solutions leaps to 7,737,809,375 different possibilities.

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