Dictionary attack |
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Dictionary attack is the most effective one – with it, the program tries every word in a dictionary (wordlist) until the password is found. This method is popular because it is well known that many people use common words as passwords. Dictionaries with hundreds of thousands of words, as well as specialist, technical and foreign language dictionaries are available, as are lists of thousands of words that are often used as passwords such as "qwerty", "abcdef" etc.
The program supports an attack by multiple dictionaries – press Dictionary list button to create or modify the dictionary list. You can use the same list for different attacks, enable/disable using particular dictionaries in a given list, and move the dictionaries up and down in the list (for example, to have smaller dictionaries at the top, and larger ones at the bottom, so they will be used only if passwords are not found in the first one(s)). Please note that the Start from line option (which allows you to start an attack from a given line in the dictionary) is used only if there is just one file in the list (and if you interrupt the attack, the "current" line number will be written there, and saved to the project file).
There is also a Dictionary file in OEM codepage option (to be set to every dictionary file individually). It could be used if the dictionary is not in Windows (ANSI) coding, e.g., if it has been created with a DOS program. Changing that option doesn't make any difference if all the words in the dictionary contain only Latin letters.
Sevaral small but very effective dictionaries are included into the PPA distribution: english.dic (about 240,000 words), german.dic (~80,000 words), russian.dic (~75,000 words). Some other very good dictionaries are available at:
ftp://ftp.cerias.purdue.edu/pub/dict/ (CERIAS Security Archive)
ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists/ (University of Oxford)
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