Which password cracking technique uses a word list to guess passwords, trying each word in the list?

Which password cracking technique uses a word list to guess passwords, trying each word in the list?

• A. Hybrid Attack
• B. Syllable Attack
• C. Dictionary Attack
• D. FOR loop

Answer: (C)

Using a word list to guess passwords is called a dictionary attack. The idea is simple: you preload a file containing likely passwords or common words, and you try each candidate as the password for the target account. This can be much faster than trying every possible character combination because the attacker focuses on words that people are actually likely to choose, such as common passwords or dictionary terms. It works best when users pick weak, common phrases, and it can be defeated by strong, unique, long passwords and by protections like rate limiting or account lockouts. This technique is distinct from approaches that modify words with mutations or from trying all possible strings, which is why the description explicitly matches a dictionary-based method.

Using a word list to guess passwords is called a dictionary attack. The idea is simple: you preload a file containing likely passwords or common words, and you try each candidate as the password for the target account. This can be much faster than trying every possible character combination because the attacker focuses on words that people are actually likely to choose, such as common passwords or dictionary terms. It works best when users pick weak, common phrases, and it can be defeated by strong, unique, long passwords and by protections like rate limiting or account lockouts. This technique is distinct from approaches that modify words with mutations or from trying all possible strings, which is why the description explicitly matches a dictionary-based method.