What is Password Cracking | Definition and Meaning

Password cracking refers to the process of running different combinations of plain text passwords through the same password hashing algorithm used to originally hash the password. The purpose of this activity is to recover the plain text passwords used for system authentication. Password cracking can be either online, or offline, with the latter requiring no additional protections on the passwords apart from the hash. The success of the attack depends solely on the amount of computing power available to the attacker.