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Cracking passwords (piefed.blahaj.zone)

When an attacker believes that their target does not use secure passwords, they can use tools that compare the digest of the target's password to any of the precompiled lists containing the digests of the most commonly used passwords.

Question: what happens under the hood (hardware and software) when the attacker knows that their target does use secure passwords, possibly using a password manager to deploy passwords of, let's say, 30 characters, whose digests do not occur on those precompiled lists? Do they "simply" have the computer brute force every permutation? For a 30 char passwd using all the upper and lower case characters on an "English" keyboard (a-Z, 0-9, ~ - ?) (94 total), that would entail running 94ˆ30 permutations.

Am I missing something?

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[-] akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 points 3 weeks ago

They haven't covered it in my IT class yet. Maybe it's a fall semester thing.

this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
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