When your computer saves your password, it doesn’t (or shouldn’t) save your password in clear-text. Great, but what does that mean? How could a password attack be offline? Well in some cases, an attacker can get a hash of your password that they can take offline and try to crack it.Ī hash is just a one-way form of encryption. Here comes one of the most obvious statements: The difference between offline and online password attacks is that… offline password attacks are offline. When a password is guessed incorrectly a certain number of times in a row, it may lock out the targeted account, block the attacker’s IP address, or both. Additionally, most applications are protected with account lockouts. When we are attempting 5 logins every second for an average password dictionary (around 10,000 passwords), this is likely going to be flagged by almost any type of logging and alerting mechanism. The second way online password attacks are limited is that they are extremely noisy. This time it takes for this back and forth transmission depends widely on the speed of the application server and the speed of the network, but a typical password attack can only get around 3 – 5 login attempts per second. Each username/password combination has to be sent over the network to the authentication server and then the server responds accordingly. First, they are limited by the speed of the network. Online password attacks are limited in two key ways. An online password attack consists of trying a large number of username/password combinations against the login portal in hopes of guessing the correct password. Online password attacks are the traditional type of attacks you can expect against a web application, exposed SSH terminal, or really any logon interface. Let’s start with the one you are probably most familiar with: online password attacks. An online password attack consists of trying to guess the username and password at the login interface.

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