Dictionary attack

Dictionary attack is often the most effective: 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.

All you have to select (in addition to the full path to the PWL file and login) is the path to the desired dictionary file, and the starting line number (in the dictionary); if you interrupt the attack, the "current" line number will be written there (and saved to the project file, of course).

A small but very effective dictionary is included in the PSPR distribution: english.dic (about 240,000 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)

 ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/unix/security/dictionaries/ (Finnish Ministry of Education, Center for Scientific Computing Ltd.)