A
Dictionary Attack is a kind of a brute-force assault on a cryptosystem or authentication system.
In a dictionary attack, the perpetrators attempt to break the encryption or gain access by spraying a library of terms or other values. The data used for automated insertion into the target can be words in a dictionary or number sequences, however it is growing more common for data in a dictionary attack to be less random (e.g. usernames and passwords from a prior data breach).
Example:
“Simply ‘updating’ a password by adding a number or a special character provides inadequate protection from account takeover. These simple fixes don’t help because, as we assume hackers already have your password from prior breaches, a dictionary attack can easily crack the user’s addition of these characters, since such an attack will run through millions of combinations in a short amount of time.
