Frederickson Security Consultants is currently conducting a security audit on the networks of Hawthorn Enterprises, a contractor for the Department of Defense. Since Hawthorn Enterprises conducts business daily with the federal government, they must abide by very stringent security policies. Frederickson is testing all of Hawthorn’s physical and logical security measures including biometrics, passwords, and permissions.
The federal government requires that all users must utilize random, non-dictionary passwords that must take at least 30 days to crack. Frederickson has confirmed that all Hawthorn employees use a random password generator for their network passwords. The Frederickson consultants have saved off numerous SAM files from Hawthorn’s servers using Pwdump6 and are going to try and crack the network passwords.
What method of attack is best suited to crack these passwords in the shortest amount of time?
A.
Birthday attack
B.
Brute service attack
C.
Brute force attack
D.
Dictionary attack
Explanation:
The most effective means of password attack is brute force, in a brute force attack the program will attempt to use every possible combination of characters. While this takes longer then a dictionary attack, which uses a text file of real words, it is always capable of breaking the password.