Password Cracking Full Explained

There is lot's of ways to crack passwords, i will explain few of them. 



Social Engineering – Social engineering is when a hacker takes 

advantage of trusting human beings to get information from them. 

For example, if the hacker was trying to get the password for a co-

workers computer, he could call the co-worker pretending to be from the IT department.

The conversation could be something like: 



Hacker- Hello my name is Ted and I’m from the IT 

department. We are currently trying to install a new 

security update on your computer, but we can’t seem to 

connect to the user database and extract your user 

information. Would you mind helping me out and letting me 

know your password before my boss starts yelling on me? It’s one of those days, ya’ know?” 



Co-worker would probably feel bad for Ted and let him know her password 

without any hesitation. Now the hacker can do whatever he pleases with account.




Shoulder surfing – Shoulder surfing is exactly what it sounds like. The 

hacker would simply attempt to look over your shoulder as you type 

in your password. The hacker may also watch weather you glance 

around your desk, looking for a written reminder or the written 

password itself. 





Guessing – If you use a weak password, a hacker could simple guess 

it by using the information he knows about you. Some examples of this are: 

date of birth, phone number, favorite pet, and other simple things like these.





Brute-force Attacks 



With time, brute-force attacks can crack any passwords. Brute-force attacks 

try every possible combination of letters, numbers, and special characters until 

the right password is found. Brute-force attacks can take a long time. The speed is 

determined by the speed of the computer running the cracking program and the 

complexity of the password. Below I will show you how Brutus can be used 

against the FTP server.



Step 1.

Put in the target and port for the pass mode choose Brute-force and click range. 




Step 2.

If you have an idea of what the password might be, then you can choose 

the right option. For example if you know a site that requires your 

password to be a certain length then you’ll know what to put down as aminimum length thus narrowing down the end results and shortening the 

cracking process. 





Step 3.

I chose lowercase alpha which has the second smallest amount of 

combinations. Even at second smallest it came up with 321, 272,407 

possible password combinations. Now you know why it can take so long to 

crack one password.