Comparative and Preventive Analysis of Dictionary Attacks

Hacking is one of the most widespread issues that the general public faces today. Hackers essentially use some social engineering techniques, combined with the publicly available information, to crack open the social media accounts, banking accounts, or cloud storage accounts. As a result, security and protection becomes the main motive for organizations running these platforms. The severity of threats linked to such incidents is tantamount to those linked with data leaks, security breaches, and security lapse events of their likes. Among others, dictionary attacks, a strategy employed for password cracking by trying every common-use word present in an extant wordlist, are the most common. Even though nowadays password strength classifiers are being used extensively almost everywhere which tends to keep these attacks at bay, they are still prone to hyper-personalized dictionary attacks as people are inclined to choose a password which revolves around their personal details itself. Consequently, the necessary awareness for the prevention of dictionary attacks is called for and is provided by performing an analysis of the time taken by different types of dictionary attacks and what type of password or otherwise is safe or not.