If you've ever watched TV and movies about cybersecurity, you probably envision someone sitting in a dark room trying to guess someone else's password based on a few facts like their kids' names or favorite sports team.
Even Mr. Robot, renowned for its realistic portrayal of technology, is guilty of showing password cracking this way.
While targeted attacks on individuals using personal information and social engineering do happen, they are not the norm. These portrayals might give people a false sense of security because they don't think their accounts are valuable or they would get locked after a few wrong guesses.
In reality, cybercriminals generally aren't guessing passwords for one person, and accounts do get locked after inputting the wrong password. That wouldn't be a very effective or efficient way to break into enough accounts to make a substantial profit.
Once a site has been breached, threat actors often share the leaked users' files from that site. The file typically contains each line in the database associated with a user — e.g., email, username, password_hash, etc. The leaks to many sites, large and small, are posted on hacking forums where other criminals and ethical security researchers race to analyze and crack the hashes in the file.
A hash is a representation of the password created after running it through a hashing algorithm. There are a variety of these algorithms (including SHA1, MD5, and Bcrypt), and they vary in their complexity. When the password "123456" is hashed, it may be stored as "e10adc3949ba59abbe56e057f20f883e." Every unique ..
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