John, a novice web user, makes a new E-mail account and keeps his password as "apple", his favorite fruit. John's password is vulnerable to which of the following password cracking attacks? Each…

Rule-based attacks rely on prior intelligence about a specific target's known password patterns or organizational policies to generate customized guesses, which does not apply when the password is an arbitrary common word with no contextual link to any attacker-defined rule set.

Brute force attack tries every possible character combination systematically; 'apple' is only 5 lowercase letters, making it crackable in seconds with any brute force tool.

Dictionary attack uses a precompiled wordlist of common words and phrases; 'apple' is a standard English word present in virtually every dictionary attack wordlist.

Hybrid attack combines dictionary words with brute-force character mutations such as appending numbers or symbols; 'apple' would be matched as a pure dictionary hit before any mutation is needed.