Different password cracking techniques

Password cracking technique	Description
Social engineering attack (guessing and shoulder surfing)	This is a technique used to manipulate human into perform an action or divulge some confidential information without using any technical actions to breaking to systems. This technique can be utilized to attack systems without any technically sophisticated attacks. Two most interesting techniques are, shoulder surfing and guessing. For instance, you can pretend as a technical staff from the ISP and enter a office premises to meet the network administrator, and ask him to login to systems and see whether everything works perfectly. When network administrator types his password attacker can silently observe his password by standing behind the administrator and looking over his shoulder. Next option is to guess the password by profiling the organization and the user. Most users use a password relevant to them. Hence, if you know the person very well , chances are high to guess what he will use as a password.
Dictionary Attack	This is a subset of brute forcing attacks. Dictionary attacks try to use combination of words instead of all possible password combination of digits. Dictionary attacks use common usernames and passwords to crack passwords. This technique use dictionary words to guess passwords.
Brute Force Attacks	This method tries all possible combination of letters, numbers and characters until they find the correct combination. Comparatively this process takes long time depending on the length of the password, complexity, and the computer speed.
Hybrid Attack	This method of password cracking tries to add numbers or symbols to previous found passwords. Some cases users’ simply add new numbers or words to the end of old password and these passwords can be cracked easily.