This article applies to all TeamViewer users.

Prospective customers who inquire about the security of TeamViewer regularly ask about encryption.

Understandably, the risk that a third party could monitor the connection or that the TeamViewer access data is being tapped is feared most.

However, the reality is that rather primitive attacks are often the most dangerous ones. In the context of computer security, a brute-force attack is a trial-and-error-method to guess a password that is protecting a resource.

With the growing computing power of standard computers, the time needed for guessing long passwords has been increasingly reduced. As a defence against brute-force attacks, TeamViewer exponentially increases the latency between connection attempts.

It thus takes as many as 17 hours for 24 attempts. The latency is only reset after successfully entering the correct password. TeamViewer not only has a mechanism in place to protect its customers from attacks from one specific computer but also from multiple computers, known as botnet attacks, that are trying to access one particular TeamViewer-ID.