When discussing passwords, what is considered a brute force attack?

Brute force password attacks iterate through every permutation of characters - across all lengths, character sets, and sequences - without making any assumptions about the password's content. Unlike dictionary or rainbow table attacks, brute force is guaranteed to eventually succeed given sufficient time because it exhausts the entire keyspace, but it is computationally expensive and time-consuming for long or complex passwords.

Using physical coercion or threats to obtain a password is called a rubber hose attack or coercion, which is a social engineering technique rather than a technical brute force method.

Loading a list of common or known words into a cracking program is a dictionary attack, which tests only pre-selected words rather than all possible combinations.

Pre-computing hashes for a large set of words and comparing them against stored hashes describes a rainbow table attack, a time-memory tradeoff technique distinct from brute force.

Waiting for a password to expire is a passive account-monitoring strategy and has no relation to any active password cracking methodology.