Ricardo has discovered the username for an application in his targets environment. As he has a limited amount of time, he decides to attempt to use a list of common passwords he found on the…

Question

Options

• AKnown plaintext
• BPassword spraying
• CBrute force
• DDictionary

• A
  5% (2)
• B
  3% (1)
• C
  3% (1)
• D
  89% (33)

Explanation

Dictionary Attack is the correct answer because Ricardo is using a pre-compiled list of common, known passwords - which is the defining characteristic of a dictionary attack. Rather than generating every possible character combination, he is feeding an existing wordlist into his cracking tool, making it faster and more targeted than a brute force approach.

Why the distractors are wrong:

• A. Known plaintext is a cryptographic attack where the attacker has access to both the plaintext and its encrypted version to deduce the encryption key - completely unrelated to password guessing.
• B. Password spraying involves taking one common password and trying it across many usernames to avoid account lockouts; Ricardo has one username and many passwords, which is the opposite approach.
• C. Brute force systematically tries every possible combination of characters (aaa, aab, aac...), whereas Ricardo is using a curated list of existing common passwords, not exhaustive combinations.

Memory Tip: Think of a "dictionary" as a book of real, existing words - a dictionary attack uses real, existing passwords from a list. If it's a pre-made list of passwords, it's a dictionary attack. If it tries every possible combination from scratch, it's brute force.

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