Brute Force Attack

A brute force attack is the most straightforward form of password cracking: the attacker tries every possible character combination until the correct one is found. With modern hardware (especially GPUs), simple passwords can be cracked in seconds.

The defense is mathematical: each additional character in a password exponentially increases the number of combinations. A 6-character password using lowercase letters has ~309 million combinations; a 16-character password using all character types has ~10³⁰: effectively uncrackable by brute force.

Password managers generate random, long passwords that make brute force attacks impractical. Rate limiting, account lockouts, and CAPTCHAs provide additional server-side defenses.