Create a List of Popular Words

In this video, you will learn how hackers guess passwords.

When creating passwords, people often use: their own name, the name of a friend or sibling, the name of a pet, favorite sports teams, a place they’d like to visit, a hobby, foods they enjoy, the month and year they were born, their street address, or the word “password.” Most devices, apps, websites, and games are built with safety measures to help protect their users’ identity and personal information.

However, there's always a chance that someone will try to guess a password in order to break into a computer system and steal, change, or destroy personal information.

This is called “hacking.” The person who does the hacking is known as a “hacker.” There are many different ways hackers can guess a password.

They might: hack a website without effective security measures to find your password, then use it on “other” sites, find personal information about you -- such as the month you were born -- and use that information to guess your password, or use a “brute force” attack.

A “brute force attack” is a trial-and-error method for obtaining a password.

It often involves using computer programs that can generate a large number of guesses -- many more than a human could try on their own.

One type of brute force attack is called the “dictionary attack.” The dictionary attack uses lists of popular words from the dictionary -- exactly the kinds of words that many people use for their passwords.

In a dictionary attack, a hacker will use a computer program to automatically enter thousands of the most common words from a dictionary as possible passwords.

Then, the hacker uses software programs to change the words to different variations, such as: Changing lowercase letters to capital letters, Adding symbols or punctuation to a password, such as an exclamation point, Or adding numbers at the end of a password.

Dictionary attacks work because these are the “same” common words and variations often used by people when creating their passwords.

Do you think a dictionary attack could guess some of the passwords you created in the previous video?

To find out, you will launch a dictionary attack on yourself! To begin, return to your Dictionary Attack spreadsheet.

Add a new sheet and name it “5,000 Most Popular Words.” A sheet is a new page of cells within your spreadsheet.

Next, open the starter project “5,000 Most Popular Words,” and select all of column A.

Use the Control-C or Command-C keys to Copy the word list, then return to your “Dictionary Attack” spreadsheet.

Open the new sheet you just created in your dictionary attack spreadsheet, and use the Control-V or Command-V keys to paste the word list into column A.

Because there are “so many” words, it may take a few seconds for the words to appear.

Now, it’s your turn: Add a new sheet to your “Dictionary Attack” spreadsheet, Rename the sheet “5,000 Most Popular Words,” Open the starter project, And copy and paste the word list into your new sheet.