If you have access to a password's hash and salt, if applicable, a brute force attempt to crack it is a guaranteed method if you have the CPU cycles available to compute it in a reasonable amount of time.  Unfortunately, guessing every single permutation of characters takes exponentially longer with the length of the password used so often times you are facing months if not years of processing time on a single PC.  While there are methods to distribute the work across multiple PCs, I am only going to go over a simple brute force algorithm and will hold off on the distributed processing model for a later article.