Building Microservices with Go

Dictionary attacks

However, not all passwords are complex, and many are susceptible to an attack known as a dictionary attack. Instead of attempting all 62 quintillion permutations, the dictionary attack concentrates on those that are most likely to succeed. The dictionaries themselves are often derived from password databases that have previously been exploited, and since humans are somewhat predictable, we often use the same passwords. Because our password HelloWorld1 is already in the dictionary, which contains 14 million other passwords, when I attempted to break the salted hash using John the Ripper, it only took 2.4 seconds to retrieve the password.