Take a common password – 8 characters in length, composed of 1 word, 1 numbers and 1 punctuation mark:
The Attack
Using a script (a program that automatically executes tasks instead of a human), the script starts to guess all possible 8-character password combinations. This will take about 3 days.
This is a brute force attack – very little elegance, just plain old grinding it out.
The More Sophisticated Attack
Using a dictionary attack, again the attacker runs a script, but this time instead of random guessing, dictionaries of words are tried first, specifically, the most common password words are tried.
See yours in here?
The Defence
Choose 3 obscure words, string them into a sentence separated by punctuation and numbers.
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