Which option is listed as a password retrieval method?

• A. Hardware, Software, and Sniffing
• B. Phishing
• C. Brute force
• D. Social engineering

Answer: (A)

Password retrieval methods include ways an attacker can obtain credentials by capturing or extracting them, either from a device, from a system, or over a network. Hardware, software, and sniffing fit this idea because hardware approaches use physical devices like keyloggers to capture credentials, software methods involve tools that recover or dump stored passwords, and sniffing intercepts credentials as they travel on a network. This contrasts with phishing or social engineering, which rely on tricking a user into giving up a password, and brute force, which tries to guess a password rather than retrieve an existing one. So the listed combination of hardware, software, and sniffing represents legitimate categories of password retrieval techniques.