How do Crackers crack passwords?
Your password is stored on the system in encrypted form. It has been run through an encryption algorithm. There is no algorithm that will take a password in encrypted form and give back the original password. So not even the system administrators know your password. Crackers can’t find out your password just by asking the system. Instead, they use a program called Crack to breach password security. The Crack program works by taking strings of characters and encrypting them, then comparing the encrypted text against your password in encrypted form. If the two encrypted versions are the same, then the string of characters is your password. It would take way too long to simply try every combination of letters you could have as your password. So Crack tries the most likely combinations. First, it starts with everything it can find out about you on the system, like your login name, your full name, your address, etc. Trying all of these takes a few milliseconds. Then it moves on to a huge “d
