CERTIFIED-IN-CYBERSECURITY · Question #783
When an attacker is using a brute force attack to break a password, what are they doing?
The correct answer is B. Trying every possible key to, over time, break any encryption. A brute force attack systematically tries every possible combination of characters until the correct password or key is found. It requires no intelligence about the target - just computational power and time. Option A describes a Rainbow Table attack (precomputed hash lookups)…
Question
When an attacker is using a brute force attack to break a password, what are they doing?
Options
- ALooking at the hash values and comparing it to thousands or millions of pre-calculated hashes.
- BTrying every possible key to, over time, break any encryption.
- CLooking at common letter frequency to guess the plaintext.
- DTrying to recover the key without breaking the encryption.
How the community answered
(38 responses)- B89% (34)
- C8% (3)
- D3% (1)
Explanation
A brute force attack systematically tries every possible combination of characters until the correct password or key is found. It requires no intelligence about the target - just computational power and time. Option A describes a Rainbow Table attack (precomputed hash lookups). Option C describes frequency analysis, used against classical ciphers. Option D describes a known-plaintext or side-channel attack attempting key recovery without full decryption.
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