A brute force attack uses a large volume of requests/responses from the same source or destination IP address to break into a system. The attacker employs a trial-and-error method to guess the response to a challenge or a request.

The Vulnerability Protection profile includes signatures to protect against brute force attacks. Each signature has an ID, Threat Name, and Severity and is triggered when a pattern is recorded. The pattern specifies the conditions and interval at which the traffic is identified as a brute-force attack; some signatures are associated with another child signature that is of a lower severity and specifies the pattern to match against. When a pattern matches against the signature or child signature, it triggers the default action for the signature.

To enforce protection: