Eccouncil Exam 312-50v12 Topic 3 Question 20 Discussion

An attacker decided to crack the passwords used by industrial control systems. In this process, he employed a loop strategy to recover these passwords. He used one character at a time to check whether the first character entered is correct; if so, he continued the loop for consecutive characters. If not, he terminated the loop. Furthermore, the attacker checked how much time the device took to finish one complete password authentication process, through which he deduced how many characters entered are correct.

What is the attack technique employed by the attacker to crack the passwords of the industrial control systems?