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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T14:29:49+00:00

Another simple question from silly old me. We keep hearing big numbers being thrown

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Another simple question from silly old me.

We keep hearing big numbers being thrown around, for example the key:

234234-234WEF-ER334AS-3535FWF

Would take 20 billion gazillion years for anyone to crack.

Could someone explain how you even know when you have cracked it? If you have permutated a trillion combinations how do you know if you have passed the correct one? Surely you would have to test it on the live system which wouldn’t be able to handle that many requests so fast, and a half brained system admin would notice the attack.

I keep seeing competitions to ‘crack the key ############’, how are you meant to know when you have a solution? You magically come across the english phrase “Ha you wont find me!” or something?

What am I missing?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    the key picking process has two steps:

    1. Pick next key (bruteforce or dictionary)
    2. Validate, if failed goto 1

    If you are cracking remote application owner can prevent picking by limiting validations in some way. (3 attempts, then pause for example). If you are cracking something local, like encrypted rar file then owner can make picking hard by making validation heavy operation, like encode it several times.

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