What is brute-force attack?
A Brute-force attack, such as ‘Smurf’ attack, targets a feature in the IP specification known as directed or subnet broadcasting, to quickly flood the target network with useless data. A Smurf hacker flood a destination IP address of each packet is the broadcast address of the network; the router will broadcast the ICMP echo request packet to all hosts on the network. If there are numerous hosts, this will create a large amount of ICMP echo request packet, the resulting ICMP traffic will not only clog up the ‘intermediary’ network, but will also congest the network of the spoofed source IP address, known as the ‘victim’ network. This flood of broadcast traffic consumes all available bandwidth, making communications impossible.
A Brute-force attack, such as ‘Smurf’ attack, targets a feature in the IP specification known as directed or subnet broadcasting, to quickly flood the target network with useless data. A Smurf hacker flood a destination IP address of each packet is the broadcast address of the network, the router will broadcast the ICMP echo request packet to all hosts on the network. If there are numerous hosts, this will create a large amount of ICMP echo request packet, the resulting ICMP traffic will not only clog up the ‘intermediary’ network, but will also congest the network of the spoofed source IP address, known as the ‘victim’ network. This flood of broadcast traffic consumes all available bandwidth, making communications impossible.
In a brute force attack, the program tries to guess your password by trying every single combination of characters until your password is found. For example, the program might follow a sequence like this: “aaaaaaaa”, “aaaaaaab”, “aaaaaaac” etc until the password is found. Obviously, this method will take time, for an eight character lowercase alpha password there are 200 Billion combinations to be checked. But with modern computers this sort of attack doesn’t take as long as you might think. The brute force attack is the slowest method of password attack, but can often be successful on short and simple passwords.
