The 9 Most Common Tricks Used to Hack Passwords

When you hear "security breach," what springs to mind? A malevolent hacker sitting in front of screens covered in Matrix-style digital text? Or a basement-dwelling teenager who hasn't seen daylight in three weeks? How about a powerful supercomputer attempting to hack the entire world?

Hacking is all about one thing: your password. If someone can guess your password, they don't need fancy hacking techniques and supercomputers. They'll just log in, acting as you. If your password is short and simple, it's game over.

There are nine common tactics hackers use to hack your password.

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1. Dictionary Hack

First up in the common password hacking tactics guide is the dictionary attack. Why is it called a dictionary attack? Because it automatically tries every word in a defined "dictionary" against the password. The dictionary isn't strictly the one you used in school.

No. This dictionary is a small file containing the most commonly used password combinations, making it easy to guess someone's password. That includes 123456, qwerty, password, iloveyou, and the all-time classic, hunter2.

The above table detailed the most leaked passwords in 2016. The below table detailed the most leaked passwords in 2020.

Note the similarities between the two—and make sure you don't use these incredibly simple options. Now, has anything changed three years later, in 2023? Absolutely not. We've even added ten more of the most commonly leaked passwords to show just how bad they are.

Long story short, if you don't want someone to figure out your password, never use any of these.

2. Brute Force

Next up is the brute force attack, whereby an attacker tries every possible character combination in an attempt to guess your password. Attempted passwords will match the specifications for the complexity rules, e.g., including one upper-case, one lower-case, decimals of Pi, your pizza order, and so on.

A brute force attack will also try the most commonly used alphanumeric character combinations first, too. These include the previously listed passwords, as well as 1q2w3e4r5t, zxcvbnm, and qwertyuiop. It can take a very long time to figure out a password using this method, but that depends entirely on password complexity.

3. Mask Attack

What happens if the person stealing your password knows some of it already? Can they use the snippets of information to make cracking the rest of the password easier?

That's exactly what a mask password attack is. As it still involves trying numerous password combinations, a mask attack is similar to a brute-force attack. However, in a mask attack, the password thief may already know a few precious characters from your password, making the process of finding the rest easier.

4. Phishing

This isn't strictly a "hack," but falling prey to a phishing or spear-phishing attempt will usually end badly. General phishing emails are sent by the billions to all manner of internet users around the globe, and it is one of the most popular ways to find out someone's password.

A phishing email generally works like this:

1. The target user receives a spoofed email purporting to be from a major organization or business.
2. Spoofed email demands immediate attention, featuring a link to a website.
3. This link actually connects to a fake login portal, mocked up to appear exactly the same as the legitimate site.
4. The unsuspecting target user enters their login credentials and is either redirected or told to try again.
5. User credentials are stolen, sold, or used nefariously (or both).

The daily spam volume sent worldwide remains high, accounting for over half of all emails sent globally. Furthermore, the volume of malicious attachments is high, too, with Kaspersky blocking over 166 million malicious attachments in 2022—18 million more than in 2021. But the more shocking figure is the number of phishing links blocked, rising from 253 million in 2021 to 507 million in 2022. Remember, this is just for Kaspersky, so the real number is much higher.

Back in 2017, the biggest phishing lure was a fake invoice. However, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic provided a new phishing threat. In April 2020, not long after many countries went into pandemic lockdown, Google announced it was blocking over 18 million COVID-19-themed malicious spam and phishing emails per day. Huge numbers of these emails use official government or health organization branding for legitimacy and catch victims off-guard.

5. Social Engineering

Social engineering is essentially phishing in the real world, away from the screen.

A core part of any security audit is gauging what the workforce understands. For instance, a security company will phone the business they are auditing. The "attacker" tells the person on the phone they are the new office tech support team and they need the latest password for something specific.

An unsuspecting individual may hand over the keys without a pause for thought.

The scary thing is how often this works. Social engineering has existed for centuries. Being duplicitous to gain entry to a secure area is a common method of attack and one that is only guarded against with education. This is because the attack won't always ask directly for a password. It could be a fake plumber or electrician asking for entry to a secure building, and so on. When someone says they were tricked into revealing their password, it is often the result of social engineering.

6. Rainbow Table

A rainbow table is usually an offline password attack. For example, an attacker has acquired a list of user names and passwords, but they're encrypted. The encrypted password is hashed. This means it looks completely different from the original password.

For instance, your password is (hopefully not!) logmein. The known MD5 hash for this password is "8f4047e3233b39e4444e1aef240e80aa."

Gibberish to you and I. But in certain cases, the attacker will run a list of plaintext passwords through a hashing algorithm, comparing the results against an encrypted password file. In other cases, the encryption algorithm is vulnerable, and most passwords are already cracked, like MD5 (hence why we know the specific hash for "logmein").

This is where the rainbow table comes into its own. Instead of processing hundreds of thousands of potential passwords and matching their resulting hash, a rainbow table is a huge set of precomputed algorithm-specific hash values. Using a rainbow table drastically decreases the time it takes to crack a hashed password—but it isn't perfect. Hackers can purchase prefilled rainbow tables populated with millions of potential combinations.

7. Malware/Keylogger

Another sure way to lose your login credentials is to fall foul of malware. Malware is everywhere, with the potential to do massive damage. If the malware variant features a keylogger, you could find all of your accounts compromised.

Alternatively, the malware could specifically target private data or introduce a remote access Trojan to steal your credentials. Another option is to analyze the network to steal any passwords sent in plaintext instead of encrypted ciphertext (in a man-in-the-middle attack). If a company sends passwords anywhere using plaintext (that's just regular human-readable text), there is a strong chance of password theft.

The use of malware extends to stealing your password on your smartphone. If you download malware or a keylogger on your smartphone or tablet, it's the same issue as with your desktop or laptop. Your smartphone is likely host to countless apps, and you typically need a password for each one, and smartphone malware will happily steal your banking, social media, and other credentials.

8. Spidering

Spidering ties into the dictionary attack. If a hacker targets a specific institution or business, they might try a series of passwords relating to the business itself. The hacker could read and collate a series of related terms—or use a search spider to do the work for them.

You might have heard the term "spider" before. These search spiders are extremely similar to those that crawl through the internet, indexing content for search engines. The custom word list is then used against user accounts in the hope of finding a match.

9. Shoulder Surfing

The final option is one of the most basic. What if someone just looks over your shoulder while you're typing in your password?

Shoulder surfing sounds a little ridiculous, but it does happen. It's like one of those hacking tricks you think would never work. But if you're working in a busy downtown café and not paying attention to your surroundings, someone could get close enough to note your password as you type, but it's probably not the easiest way to figure out someone's password.

5 Ways to Keep Your Online Accounts Safe From Password Theft

So, how do you stop a hacker from stealing your password? The really short answer is that you cannot truly be 100 percent safe. The tools hackers use to steal your data are changing all the time, and there are countless videos and tutorials on guessing passwords, learning how to hack a password, or even just how to figure out someone's password.

1. Unique password: Using a strong, unique, single-use password is important. If your passwords are breached, the unique password will only grant access to one service.
2. Antivirus/antimalware: Make sure you're using a decent security tool. Upgrading to Malwarebytes Premium is a great option and offers cross-device support.
3. Update: Updating your software is time-consuming; we get it. But out-of-date software is often where security vulnerabilities lurk and those vulnerabilities can lead to stolen passwords.
4. Attachments: Don't open attachments if you don't know the sender. Use an antivirus tool to scan any attachments before opening, and if you can't verify or are unsure, don't open it.
5. Password manager: Consider installing a password manager to keep track of your passwords. They can help protect your online accounts.

Keeping your passwords safe isn't a one-off. You must consider the whole gamut of password security protection methods to keep your accounts safe.

Make Password Hacking Difficult!

If you know the most common ways passwords are hacked, you're already taking steps to protect your online accounts. So long as you're taking into account how to keep your passwords safe, you're taking positive steps, which should make it difficult for a hacker to steal your passwords.