What Are Brute Force Attacks and How Can You Protect Yourself?

If you read our security articles on a regular basis — like this one about testing your password strength — you’ve probably heard the phrase “brute force attack.” But what, exactly, does that mean? How does it work? And how can you protect yourself against it? Here’s what you need to know. Brute Force Attacks: The Basics When it comes down to it, a brute force attack is really simple: a computer program tries to guess a password or an encryption key by iterating through all possible combinations of a certain number of characters. For example, let’s say you wrote an...

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