Which of the following can be used by a security administrator to successfully recover a user’s forgotten
password on a password protected file?

A.
Cognitive password

B.
Password sniffing

C.
Brute force

D.
Social engineering

Explanation:
One way to recover a user’s forgotten password on a password protected file is to guess it. A brute force attack
is an automated attempt to open the file by using many different passwords.
A brute force attack is a trial-and-error method used to obtain information such as a user password or personalidentification number (PIN). In a brute force attack, automated software is used to generate a large number of
consecutive guesses as to the value of the desired data. Brute force attacks may be used by criminals to crack
encrypted data, or by security analysts to test an organization’s network security.
A brute force attack may also be referred to as brute force cracking.
For example, a form of brute force attack known as a dictionary attack might try all the words in a dictionary.
Other forms of brute force attack might try commonly-used passwords or combinations of letters and numbers.
An attack of this nature can be time- and resource-consuming. Hence, the name “brute force attack”; success
is usually based on computing power and the number of combinations tried rather than an ingenious algorithm.