This most likely depends on the way you look at it (or rather how exactly he did it): did he take the word list, generate hashes from it and then check them aga

This most likely depends on the way you look at it (or rather how exactly he did it): did he take the word list, generate hashes from it and then check them against leaked hashes? Rainbow table. If he took the word list to run login attempts against a server (or a local endpoint checking the leaked database) it's more of a dictionary attack. Same result, different ways to get there. If you're able to run your cracker locally against a leaked db, it probably doesn't really matter.