New IT Term of the day

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password cracking

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The process of attempting to guess or crack passwords to gain access to a computer system or network. Crackers will generally use a variety of tools, scripts, or software to crack a system password. The goal of the cracker is to ideally obtain the password for root (UNIX) or system and administrator (Windows, NT). Password cracks work by comparing every encrypted dictionary word against the entries in system password file until a match is found.