There are brute force attack software versions that are used to crack passwords just by guessing random letters and numbers.I think that such software would need years to generate the correct 12 word combination.
Password and Seed Words are two different things if I'm not mistaken. OP is talking to break through the 12 words seed to hack a wallet.
However, to break a 10 character password that uses letters, numbers, and symbols, such as "%ZBGbv]8g?" it would take 289217 years. This would take about 3 years on a supercomputer or botnet.
This is a good
read IMO. The above calculation is taken from the mentioned article.
edit: I do use over 16 characters in all my passwords, now I'm wondering how long it may take.
Edit 2: Below is also a good read to gain some knowledge - Thanks to bL4nkcode for pointing to that thread.
No, it would take much too long to bruteforce. The seed is very secure and it has a lot of entropy.
Finding a 12 words phrase with words in the english dictionnary shouldn't take to long for an algorithm.
What is making the seed secure?
I see that you have no concept of probabilities.
I'll discuss BIP39 here as that is what most wallets use for generated the seed, but some don't. A 12 word seed is secure in the same way that a 12 character random passphrase is secure. In fact, it is even more secure than a 12 character random passphrase, due to the fact that there are 2048 possible words for each of the 12 words instead of less than 100 possible characters for the 12 characters in a 12 character passphrase.
BIP39 uses 2048 possible words for each of the twelve words. That's 5444517870735015415413993718908291383296 possible combinations of 12 word seeds. Furthermore, BIP39 specifies that the seed can be in any of 7 langauges (AFAIK the seed has to be in the same language). So if you don't know the language, that's 38111625095145107907897956032358039683072 possible combinations. That is a lot of possible seeds to have to search through, and it would take much too long to search for that.
what do yiou mean by a lot of entropy?
Entropy here means randomness. The seed is based upon a completely random master private key. Additional randomness is added by hashing parts of said key and used in the seed phrase. Since the phrase is essentially completely random, there are no patterns or easy to guess things that usually make brute forcing a password easier.
Edit: Math