12 Ways Hackers Cracks Your Passwords Easily

Everything on the internet requires a password. Without a user ID and password, you can not sign up and create a new account online. From social media accounts to your bank accounts almost everywhere password gets used. Your password is everything for you, in another word, your password is nothing but a digital key to unlock your all social accounts on the Internet. Password opens the door to your personal and digital data online, it may include contacts, photos, videos, e-mails or even banking and payment details too. All these personal things get secured with one code that you used online. And as the online activities has been grown these days, you must know in how many ways hackers hack passwords while preventing hacking.

Hackers hack passwords —
Having strong password is the first step to secure your account. When hackers are trying to get your password, they don’t guess them one by one. Instead, they have a toolbox of software programs and databases that help them to figure out all the credentials that might work. In the reel life i.e. in the movies and serials, you may see many times that hacker guessing the right password to get access. Unfortunately, in real life hackers use more techniques and ways to hack an account. In previous page, I have posted How to Stay Safe Online that could help you staying safe while working online.

Even though if you set a strong password, there are chances to get hack your account by hackers easily. Always remember that hacking a password is like your house keys to a theft! How do hackers hack passwords? What is social engineering? What is Password Cracking? What is the Password cracking techniques? All these answers you will get in this article.

In this article, I am providing techniques and approches about how do hackers hack passwords and how you are not a part of it. The 10 most used hacking ways where you need to know how can a hacker hacks your passwords. So, let's take a look at it.

How Hackers Really Crack Your Passwords

How do hackers hack passwords How do hackers figure out our passwords?

Learn about the techniques they use to crack the codes by the process of decrypting passwords and credential stuffing:

1. Phishing

This trick is commonly used by hackers nowadays. Over 70% of all cybercrimes begin with a phishing attack. A phishing attack is a fraudulent attempt and cybercrime attack happens by hackers. Hackers love to use phishing techniques to steal user credentials. They always ready to obtain sensitive data from your computer and smartphone. Phishing is a social engineering trick used by hackers. It seems like the ligament of vendors and people easily believe it and gets stuck in the trap. didn't understand? Let me explain. Hackers always use some extraordinary tricks and techniques to attract people. They always offer eye-catchy and attention-grabbing statements on their email and message to grab users attention quickly. The design and the logo look so attractive. Also, they always claim that you won any iPhone or some of the biggest price. You have to make sure to do not to click any such fraudulent links even though it seems good and true.

Once you click on the phishing link that comes with a fake URL, it takes you to a website, where it forces you to fill out your details and from all the process hacker can hack your password easily. Sometimes, if you click on that link hackers can take whole control of your machine. The majority of phishing e-mails contain misspellings or other silly errors that are not much difficult to find but if you take a moment and inspect the message, you can find the error. So, check e-mails that contain attachments carefully and never click on them.

2. Credential Stuffing

It is estimated that billions of social accounts are checked daily by hackers using credential stuffing. Credential stuffing is used to test databases or lists of stolen passwords and user names against multiple accounts to see if there’s a match. How does credential stuffing work? Let suppose, you have set "12345" as your Netflix password and then you re-use the same password for your Amazon prime account or Netflix subscription and even for your bank account, if a hacker breaks into any one of this account and once they got your password, they could use it for calculating and guessing your all of the others passwords to gain access to all the rest of the accounts. The key to not becoming a part of credential stuffing is very simple, you just have to make sure that to set unique and different passwords for every account and site and it should strong enough. Always remember that your existing password should not get a match for your other accounts.

3. Password Spraying

Password spraying is a technique that attempts to use a list of commonly used passwords against a user account name, such as 123456, password123 and others. The password spraying method is more straightforward. Password spraying affects businesses too, How? A bunch of employees works in a company or organisation. In such case, hackers always able to gain information about their employee from public sources and organisation sites on the Internet. As once they gain information, they rely on that organisation to use the same username as a public domain. To access their business accounts, the hacker will use those usernames and passwords that used frequently like Password123, 12345, Company or organisation name, date of birth and so on. The hackers have a list of usernames, but they have no idea of the actual password, so they use such passwords according to the company and business that can be frequently used to unlock their account. Most sites will detect repeated password attempts from the same IP address. So, password spraying is an attack that attempts to access a large number of accounts with a few commonly used passwords.

4. Brute Force Attack

A brute force attack, also known as the brute force cracking method. A Brute force attack is a simple and reliable technique to hack password. It is a trial and error method by hackers. Brute force is all about guessing the login information. Hackers will do all possible way to crack a password or username in this method. How many times do hackers attempt manually crack a password?

It is a slightly tricky thing to crack any account but it is still an effective and popular way for hackers. Brute Force attack uses almost all the combinations and sources to crack the password. For Ex. If you try to find out a 4 digit password through Brute Force, then it will start from 0000 and it goes to 9999 until and unless the correct password isn't found. Each brute force attack can use different methods to unlock and access sensitive data.

5. Dictionary attack

This type of attack relies on programs that run from a default list of common words or phrases commonly used in passwords. What is the most common password used by people? You are also able to find those easily. Just think if it is a common popular and simple one, then there is no sense to set such passwords for your account. Most dictionaries will be made up of credentials gained from previous hacks, although they will also contain the most common passwords and word combinations. This takes advantage of the fact that many people will use memorable phrases as passwords, which are usually whole words stuck together. This is largely the reason why systems will urge the use of multiple character types when creating a password. If the password is short, it will be easy to crack, but if it is a long digit password or any phrase like 15 digits, then it will be hard to crack the password.

6. Mask attack

As we see above, that dictionary attacks use lists of all possible phrase and word combinations, but in the case of mask attack, it is far more specific in its work. Mask attack usually refines estimates based on characters or numbers in existing knowledge.

For Example, if a hacker is aware that a password begins with a number, they will able to tailor the mask to only try those types of passwords. Password length, the arrangement of characters, whether many special characters are included and how many times a single character is repeated, all these things are favourable to the hacker. The goal of hackers is to drastically reduce the time to crack a password and remove any unnecessary processing. That's how to mask-attack will work on detailing on password.

7. Shoulder Surfing [Network analyser]

A very common and simple method is here called shoulder surfing. Shoulder surfing is a form of social engineering. It is a criminal practice where theft or hacker or any third party can steal your data by spying on your shoulder. In the office or the public places, everywhere it could happen.

A network analyser is a tool that allows hackers to monitor and intercept data packets sent over a network and lift the plain text passwords contained within. I know it's hard to understand for many of you. Let me explain below.

A network analyzer hacks passwords by sniffing the packets traversing the network. This is what the bad guys do if they can gain control of a computer, tap into your wireless network, or gain physical network access to set up their network analyzer. If they gain physical access, they can look for a network jack on the wall and plug right in!

This is a genuine threat for every person who looking over your shoulder to see the sensitive data or password. This kind of method of hacking looks natural and common, but hackers can do anything to access data and your password. In such a case, you have to make sure that nobody is peeking their head in your smartphone while login into your account.

8. Spidering

Spidering method is describes the process overall target of hackers. The process is as similar as malware and brute force attack but this method is far more and deep than these methods over there. Hackers can study business and the products that it creates to build a list of the possible word in combinations, and those words used in a brute force attack. Spidering is the process is usually underpinned by automation. When organisations or any company use passwords that relate to their business or their branding to make it easier and to remember for their employee. Hackers can exploit this by studying the overall company and its branding. They are expert in guessing the password of such a company or organisation. Simply, they build a list of all the possible words in combinations and able to hack the password and access the data.

9. Keylogging

Keyloggers record the strokes that you type on the keyboard and can be a particularly effective means of obtaining credentials things like online bank accounts, crypto wallets and other logins with secure forms.

Key-logging is often a technique that hackers are focusing only on the targeted key attacks. The hacker either knows the targeted words like spouse, colleague, relative or is particularly interested in the victim corporate or nation-state surveillance.

10. Guessing

This is nothing but a far more useful technique to hack any passwords. Hackers are more experts to guess the password according to the organisation or a company. If all the methods gone fails, they try to guess your password as per their point of view.

Many users always try to use phrases and still rely on those phrases numbers all the time. Passwords that they use can be relatable to their hobbies and pets or families. So once a hacker finds out these root cause, it will help to hack them easily.

11. Offline Cracking

Hackers not only hack passwords online, but they do their work offline too. In another word, offline methods are also allowed to unlock your account from hackers. In this case, hackers can get a hash of your password that they can take offline and try to crack it. A hash is just a one-way form of encryption. You have to remember that not all hacking methods takes a place of over the Internet. But in this method, there is no need for any Internet connection to hack your account password. The offline hacking process usually involves decrypting passwords using a list of hashes taken from recent data breaches.

Suppose if your password is "Password123" your computer will store as a form of "42f749ade7f9e195bf475f37a44cafcb". This is nothing but system code, you can call "encryption" over there. If you observe in WhatsApp, there are displayed a notice about "End to end encryption" above the chat section. This way if anyone can read the memory of your computer, they won’t be able to know what your password is.

12. Extortion

Extortion hacking happens when a blackmail demand is accompanied by computer hacking or the threat of computer hacking. Somebody demands you to give them your credentials.

Someone may demand your password Even if you are not able to give them the credentials. The hacker tries to blackmail and means to harm you or embarrass you, such as revealing sensitive information, images or videos about you, or threatening the physical safety of yourself or your loved ones.

Video: 9 Ways Hackers Steal Your Password

9 Ways Hackers Steal Your Password

Bottom Line

There are various types of tools and software's are available that hackers use to hack passwords. Starting with a simple force attack and moving towards sophisticated methods, all the possible ways that hackers use to crack any password. Password cracking is evolving every day. But some protection tips and tricks over there by using you can get rid of them.

Using strong passwords is the best protection against password cracking. If you understand the concepts and methods that given, there is no need to explain more about how to set passwords. So, make it a complicated and not simple one and then the article will be worth it for all of us. While creating an account or existing users have must use enough symbols and different characters to ensures that even the fastest computer won’t crack your account in this lifetime. I explained almost all possible ways that every hacker use to hack passwords. I hope you learn above all the methods and learn how to protect your accounts from hackers.