Frederickson Security Consultants is currently conducting a security audit on the networks of
Hawthorn Enterprises, a contractor for the Department of Defense. Since Hawthorn Enterprises
conducts business daily with the federal government, they must abide by very stringent security
policies. Frederickson is testing all of Hawthorn’s physical and logical security measures including
biometrics, passwords, and permissions. The federal government requires that all users must
utilize random, non-dictionary passwords that must take at least 30 days to crack. Frederickson
has confirmed that all Hawthorn employees use a random password generator for their network
passwords. The Frederickson consultants have saved off numerous SAM files from Hawthorn’s
servers using Pwdump6 and are going to try and crack the network passwords. What method of
attack is best suited to crack these passwords in the shortest amount of time?

A.
Brute force attack

B.
Birthday attack

C.
Dictionary attack

D.
Brute service attack