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Whether you’re talking about identity theft, data breaches, or any other form of cybercrime, one of the leading causes of successful cyberattacks is the use of insufficiently secure passwords. Just how easy is it for someone to bypass such a password? Let’s consider the facts.
How to Crack a Password
Cybercriminals come correct, first of all. Not only do many of them have access to some pretty sophisticated tools and resources, they go about their selfish and deceitful activities with a strategy based on the average user’s online conduct.
For the cybercriminal, bypassing a password is really a numbers game. Chances are good that, if they try some commonly used passwords, a cybercriminal will eventually hit pay dirt. For instance, a cybercriminal’s first guesses could look like the following:
- 123456789
- guest
- qwerty
- password
- a1b2c3
Since these are some of the world’s most common passwords—with an estimated 10 to 20% of accounts using a similar password—trying different variations of them or adding one or two symbols gives a cybercriminal a pretty good chance of getting in.
If we imagine ourselves to be cybercriminals, this knowledge helps to simplify our process immensely. If we invest in a password cracking tool, which effectively just tries every dictionary word and randomized combination of characters, increasing in length as it goes, chances are good that we will ultimately get in.
It’s just like trying to guess a combination lock number. While it’s going to take some time, you could try every possible combination—1-1-1, 1-1-2, 1-1-3—until you either get it, or the bike’s owner is back and not-so-politely asking you to step away from their property.
The more variables there are to try, the more possible options there are—increasing at exponential rates, making it impossible to manually try every single combination. A computer, on the other hand, could try…and much, much faster. That’s how a password-cracking tool operates.
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