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The Dictionary attack is one of the most effective attacks. The program tries every word in a dictionary (wordlist) until the password is found. This method is popular because many people use common words as passwords. Dictionaries with hundreds of thousands of words, as well as specialist, technical and foreign language dictionaries are available, as are lists of thousands of words that are often used as passwords such as "qwerty", "abcdef" etc.

 

The program supports an attack with multiple dictionaries. Press Dictionary list to create or modify the dictionary list. You can use the same list for different attacks, enable/disable particular dictionaries in a given list, and move dictionaries up and down in the list (for example, to have smaller dictionaries at the top, and larger ones at the bottom). Please note that the Start from line option (which allows you to start an attack from a given line in the dictionary) is used only if there is a single file in the list (and if you interrupt the attack, the "current" line number will be written there, and saved to the project file).

 

The Dictionary file in OEM codepage option individually applies to each dictionary file. It could be used if the dictionary is not in the Windows (ANSI) coding. Changing that option doesn't make any difference if all the words in the dictionary contain only Latin letters.

 

Several small but very effective dictionaries are included into the PPA distribution: english.dic (about 240,000 words), german.dic (~80,000 words), russian.dic (~75,000 words).