Jacky encrypts her documents using a password. It is known that she uses her daughter's year of birth as part of the password. Which password cracking technique would be optimal to crack her password?

The correct answer is A. Rule-based attack. A rule-based attack is optimal when specific, known information about a password's structure is available. In this case, the attacker knows the password contains a year of birth. Rules can be defined to append, prepend, or substitute year patterns (e.g., 1990-2010) against a…

Submitted by joshua94· Apr 18, 2026Disk Forensics

Question

Options

ARule-based attack
BBrute force attack
CSyllable attack
DHybrid attack

How the community answered

(43 responses)

A
84% (36)
B
9% (4)
C
5% (2)
D
2% (1)

Explanation

A rule-based attack is optimal when specific, known information about a password's structure is available. In this case, the attacker knows the password contains a year of birth. Rules can be defined to append, prepend, or substitute year patterns (e.g., 1990-2010) against a wordlist. This is far more targeted and efficient than brute force (which blindly tries all combinations) or dictionary attacks (which use common words without structural knowledge). The known constraint - a year - makes rule-based the best fit.

Topics

#Password cracking#Rule-based attack#Digital forensics techniques

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