Brute force attack just means an attack that isn't smart and instead relies on just trying a lot. For instance, if you have a padlock with 3 dials on it, I can

Brute force attack just means an attack that isn't smart and instead relies on just trying a lot. For instance, if you have a padlock with 3 dials on it, I can just try 000 through 999 and at some point I will find the correct solution. A smarter attack could be to try and watch you close the padlock. A more efficient brute force attack could be to try popular combinations first (e.g. 000, 123, 987). Your question is not very specific as it doesn't contain the context of the attack, are we talking about cracking a user's password? Usually a simple first mitigation for bruteforce attacks is to limit the user's attempts (e.g. if you get your password wrong 3 times, you are locked out for 10 minutes). Another good practice is to make sure people's passwords are at the very least 8 characters long, then trying every attempt becomes quite difficult just because of the amount of possibilities.