Passwords are something that we all use daily, and having a good understanding of how to crack passwords can aid in a successful penetration test. Keep in mind the trade-off with password security; the more complex the password is, the greater are the chances of people circumventing it. Password re-use is a common flaw that people make, so you might end up discovering that an end user's password for an online service is the same as their user account for the corporate network. In all the tools used for password cracking, there is support for throttling brute force attempts. This feature enables you to blend in brute force attacks with everyday traffic and ultimately reduce lockouts.

In this chapter, you have learned about the history of passwords. We looked at how you can discover usernames from public files that expose metadata. You have learned about online resources...