nerdexam
GIAC

GCIH · Question #139

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…

The correct answer is A. Hybrid attack C. Dictionary attack D. Brute Force attack. The password 'apple' is a plain English dictionary word, making it immediately vulnerable to dictionary, hybrid, and brute force attacks, but not rule-based attacks which require prior knowledge of the target's password habits.

Vulnerability Exploitation & Privilege Escalation

Question

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 correct answer represents a complete solution. Choose all that apply.

Options

  • AHybrid attack
  • BRule based attack
  • CDictionary attack
  • DBrute Force attack

How the community answered

(37 responses)
  • A
    95% (35)
  • B
    5% (2)

Why each option

The password 'apple' is a plain English dictionary word, making it immediately vulnerable to dictionary, hybrid, and brute force attacks, but not rule-based attacks which require prior knowledge of the target's password habits.

AHybrid attackCorrect

A hybrid attack combines dictionary words with brute force mutations such as appending numbers or symbols, so 'apple' along with variants like 'apple1' or 'Apple!' would be cracked quickly.

BRule based attack

A rule-based attack requires prior intelligence about the target's specific password construction habits or patterns to define transformation rules - without any such profiling on John, this method has no structural advantage over a dictionary attack.

CDictionary attackCorrect

A dictionary attack tests words from a predefined wordlist - 'apple' is a standard English word present in virtually every common password dictionary, making it trivially vulnerable.

DBrute Force attackCorrect

A brute force attack exhaustively tries all character combinations - a short, all-lowercase 5-character word like 'apple' would be cracked in seconds with modern computing hardware.

Concept tested: Password vulnerability to dictionary, hybrid, and brute force cracking

Source: https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html

Topics

#password cracking#dictionary attack#brute force#hybrid attack

Community Discussion

No community discussion yet for this question.

Sign up to join the discussion
Full GCIH Practice