Brute-force is a way of breaking passwords. A brute-force attack involves ensuring that all possible combinations of characters are used for any length of password. This means that as long as the attack is allowed to try every possible combination, it will definitely find the correct password at some point. This is why increasing password length and using more character sets to form passwords with will make it much more difficult to break passwords using this method.
The problem with the brute-force attack is that it needs to try every possible combination of passwords, which can take a long time. This is especially so with longer passwords using many character sets. Other attack techniques try to make use of the human need to use more easily remembered passwords, such as using words. Among the methods which use such attacks are dictionary attacks.
Last updated: 2 September 2017