Now let's assume you tried all the attacks that we learned so far on your target website you tried all
of them on the Web site on the same server and none of these Web sites is vulnerable.
You went and you tried to hack into that server using the applications installed on the server using
the server side attacks.
So you use the port scanner and you determine the programs and the open ports.
And he tried to hack into the server based on these services.
And again you still didn't find any way to get in.
And let's assume that you try to attack the data center itself which contains all the servers and again
you still didn't manage to gain access and you try to hog the users that use the Web sites all the Web
sites on the same server as your target web site.
So you try to hug the users you try to hack the admins and you try to hide the support people using
social engineering attacks and all these attacks.
And again you still didn't manage to gain your access.
Then I'd usually go down to brute force attacks.
Now a lot of people would actually try brute force attacks before that but I just don't really like
brute force attacks.
Not because they're not useful or because they're not effective they're actually very effective but
it's just that I don't really feel satisfaction when I gain access to a system using a brute force attack.
So what we mean by brute force attacks is we're going to go to the logon screen.
Most web sites have logon screen to allow the admins to log in and we're going to try to determine all
possible combinations of the password.
So there's two flavors of brute force attacks or I should say guessing attacks.
There is brute force attacks and dictionary attacks so brute force attacks would try to cover all possible
combinations of the password for example on your phone.
The pain can only be made out of numbers so you can actually cover all possibilities very easily because
the pin only has four digits and there is only nine possibilities when this comes to passwords especially
when it comes to Web log ins.
You have lowercase characters uppercase characters symbols and digits which makes the brute force attack
really unfeasible because it'll take years to cover all possibilities.
This leads us to the dictionary attack where do you actually cover all possibilities in a list.
So we're going to have a list of passwords.
These can be made of common passwords or based on the research that you did on your target in the dictionary
attack.
You only covered the passwords that exist in the wordlist.
So unlike the brute force attack it's not guaranteed because with the brute force we're going to cover
all possible combinations in the dictionary attack.
We're only going to cover the passwords.
There are in our warrantless or in the dictionary.
So the next few lectures we're going to see how you can create your own dictionary and we're going to
see how we can relaunch a brute force attack to gain access to a system without exploiting any vulnerabilities.
All we're going to do is just try a large number of passwords until one of them works.
And this is the reason why I don't really like brute force because there is no smart way you're not
actually exploiting anything.
You're literally just guessing the password until it works.
Keep in mind though just because I don't like it doesn't mean that it's not effective.
I've actually in many cases I spent days trying to break into a system and at the end one of the times
I still remember the password was one two three four five six ABC which you'd probably if you had a
word list of common passwords you'll probably gain access to that system within an hour or two.