Hashcat is a powerful and versatile password cracking tool that excels in attacking hashed passwords. It stands out for its speed and efficiency, particularly when leveraging the computational power of graphics processing units (GPUs).
Features
- Hashcat supports a wide range of hash algorithms, including MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512, and more. This versatility makes it applicable for cracking password hashes generated by various systems and applications.
- Hashcat is optimized for both CPU and GPU acceleration. Utilizing the parallel processing capabilities of modern GPUs allows Hashcat to perform significantly faster than traditional CPU-based password cracking tools.
- Hashcat offers various attack modes, such as dictionary attacks, brute-force attacks, hybrid attacks, and rule-based attacks. This flexibility enables users to adapt their approach based on the characteristics of the password they are trying to crack.
- Users can customize their attacks by creating or modifying wordlists and rules. This allows for tailored password cracking strategies, including the incorporation of common patterns and modifications.
- Hashcat supports session saving and resuming, enabling users to pause and later resume password cracking tasks. This feature is particularly valuable for handling large-scale and time-consuming attacks.
Installation
Use the following command to install Hashcat from the official Kali Linux repositories:
Running
Obtain the password hashes you want to crack. Hashcat supports various hash formats, and the hashes can be stored in a file.
Select the appropriate attack mode based on the available information about the passwords. For example, use a dictionary attack (-a 0) for known words or a brute-force attack (-a 3) for unknown passwords.
Provide the path to the file containing the hashes using the -m parameter. For example:
Replace 0 with the hash type identifier, 0 with the attack mode, hashes.txt with the file containing the hashes, and dictionary.txt with the dictionary file.
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