What is a brute force attack?

A brute-force attack is the kind of an attack that means attacker submitting many passwords or passphrases with the hope of eventually guessing correctly.

A brute force attack would be comprised of using a tool to exploit an attack on a password which would try to use as many different combinations as possible inorder to access the protected account/service or area.

An example of this might be a dictionary attack where many common passwords are built up and tried out one by one to enter the locked location to gain unauthorized access.